Saskatchewan’s Star Blanket Cree Nation says ground-penetrating radar has detected possible anomalies at the site of the former Qu’Appelle Residential School near Lebret, Saskatchewan, one of the oldest residential schools in the country.HO/The Canadian Press.
A Saskatchewan First Nation announcing it has discovered hundreds of underground “anomalies” while searching for unmarked graves is the first in nearly two years of such discoveries in Canada to offer a clear blueprint for determining what’s inside definitely underground.
The Star Blanket Cree Nation, located about 70 kilometers northeast of Regina, said Thursday it found a child’s jaw on the surface and more than 2,000 underground anomalies at the site of a former residential school. He used ground-penetrating radar, which cannot differentiate human remains from other ground disturbances.
In the coming months, the First Nation said it will deploy cutting-edge DNA identification techniques to determine what or who is underneath.
Axiom Exploration Group, a Saskatoon-based geology and engineering company, will soon begin extracting core samples from each of the 2,000 sites, similar to the process used in mining exploration, and testing each sample for the presence of DNA. The method would comply with the instructions of elders and community knowledge bearers to avoid disturbing the confirmed remains, said Sheldon Poitras, head of the Star Blanket search.
The First Nation’s plan could provide a template for other communities looking for unmarked graves across the country. Since the Tk’emlúps te Secwépemc First Nation in British Columbia announced it had discovered about 200 possible unmarked graves with ground-penetrating radar by 2021, more than 80 other communities have launched searches of their own. Of these, 13 have announced preliminary radar results.
Poitras said the 2,000 abnormalities discovered on the Star Blanket Cree Nation do not necessarily mean they are unmarked graves. “It could be a rock underground, it could be a clump of gravel, it could be a piece of wood, or it could actually be something. We don’t know yet.”
The community has received permission to test the central sampling method at a nearby Catholic cemetery.
During the Star Blanket search, signals received from ground-penetrating radar were found between one and eight feet underground; the jaw appeared on the surface, next to a gopher hole.
A security guard found the jaw fragment while walking around the grounds on October 2. It has since been examined by police and the Saskatchewan Coroner’s Service, Poitras said. The bone is believed to be from a boy aged between four and six and dates from 1898.
At the time, the grounds where the bone was discovered would have formed a front yard for the Qu’Appelle Roman Catholic Industrial School, later known as the Lebret Indian Industrial School, which opened in 1884.
Turn-of-the-century images show agricultural activity on the grounds, but no graves.
The bone is “physical evidence, physical evidence, of an unmarked grave,” said Mr. poitras
Community investigators are combing through death records kept by the school to identify the remains. Final confirmation will require DNA testing because of the number of students who died around the same time, said lead investigator Sherrie Bellegarde. “There was a lot of death,” he said. “When we passed [the records]It was very hard for our research team.”
In the 1890s and early 1900s, countless students died of influenza, measles, and tuberculosis.
Prime Minister Justin Trudeau called the discovery “difficult news,” and Crown-Indigenous Relations Minister Marc Miller attended Zoom’s announcement. “The discovery of the human remains of a very young child at the site of the Lebret residential school is not only a tragic reminder of Canada’s painful history and the heinous acts that took place in residential schools, it is further evidence of ‘this’, Mr. Miller. he stated on Twitter.
Lebret School operated under various incarnations from 1884 to 1998. It was run by Catholic orders until 1969, when the federal government assumed control. From the early 1970s, it was co-managed by Ottawa and a local council of 24 district chiefs until the community took ownership in 1984.
“It was unthinkable. It was profound. It was sad. It was damaging,” Chief Michael Starr said of what happened at the residential school. “And we were very angry about what had happened to our young people here.”
A school survivor told how she was taken away from her parents.
“They tried to take the spirit out of us. They tried to take the Indian out of us,” Sharon Strongarm said. “But thanks to the Creator, we’re back here, strong as we’ll ever be, helping each other.”