On the fifth anniversary of the harrowing discovery of potential unmarked graves in Kamloops, B.C., experts at a survivor-led organization say finding the truth isn’t as simple as digging up bodies. 

Through ground-penetrating radar (GPR) surveys, Tk’emlúps te Secwépemc First Nation discovered 215 anomalies at the site of Kamloops Indian Residential School in May 2021. The news sparked a wave of investigations looking into missing children and unmarked burials. Archeologist Scott Hamilton of Survivors’ Secretariat, an Ontario-based organization documenting residential school experiences, says a simplistic frenzy for geophysical technologies also caught on like wildfire. 

“Just about every other search team bought into the notion that gee-whiz science was going to solve the problem. All you do is roll these machines like a lawn mower back and forth across the ground, and bippity boppity, there will be graves,” Hamilton said. “It was a mix of popular consumption of police procedural television, where the crime gets solved and the perpetrator caught within 43 minutes.”

The Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) reported over a decade ago that at least 3,200 students died due to the residential school system, noting the number is likely a conservative estimate. Yet, residential school denialists continue to argue that if no bodies are dug up soon, mass graves are a hoax.

Hamilton, who has been investigating unmarked burials for decades and was a researcher with the TRC, says that along with anti-Indigenous racism, the haste for finding skeletal remains is due to an oversimplified understanding of GPR surveys. 

Ground-penetrating radar works by rolling a cart that emits high-frequency radio waves over a gridded site. The strength and rate of the electromagnetic energy that is reflected back from the materials underground are then captured in a radargram to be interpreted by experts. Factors like soil type, moisture and interferences from mobile phones and radio transmitters can influence results. Since GPRs are mostly used in civil engineering to detect pipes, Hamilton argues that the technology and expertise have yet to catch up to the intricacies of grave detection.  

“[Radargrams] kind of look like Picasso paintings on acid,” Hamilton said. “Metal pipes reflect strongly … Detection of graves, children’s graves that might be deep or not deep, might be in coffins, might not be in coffins, is a much more complicated proposition.”

In the case of Tk’emlúps, where archeologist Sarah Beaulieu had initially identified 215 anomalies for further investigation, the number was revised after seven weeks down to 200 suspected burials. 

Another emerging forensic solution is LiDAR, short for light detection and ranging. Using aerial drones or terrestrial carts, laser pulses create 3D topographic maps that could complement GPR results. Some communities like Tk’emlúps te Secwépemc First Nation have turned to these instruments. Given the unique historical, cultural and archaeological circumstances of every residential school, no tool can be implemented universally, Hamilton says.

Soil spectroscopy can also complement LiDAR and GPR ground searches. By inserting a probe into the soil that sends back chemistry readings, unique signatures of human remains, such as fatty acids and salts, can be detected. Ohio-based S4 Mobile Laboratories has already sold three units in Canada, with Sturgeon Lake Cree Nation citing the technology as one of the methods that helped discover 62 potential unmarked graves in Alberta.    

Survivors’ Secretariat lead Laura Arndt has been documenting Indigenous peoples’ experiences at the Mohawk Institute Indian Residential School in Ontario, Canada’s first and longest continuously running residential school. She said GPR and soil testing tend to reinvoke trauma. As families rush to find out whether their loved ones were buried at sites where remains are suspected, many of their questions are left unanswered, even if excavation takes place, Arndt explained.

“How would you feel if somebody dug up a family member of yours, took a piece of their bones, rounded it up, put some solution on it to try and figure out how old they were, if they’re a boy or a girl, and it’s not going to tell them who your ancestor was. You’re not going to support it because you should leave graves undisturbed. That is the way it goes for many cultures,” she said. 

The group now favours records and documents for research.  

As of May 2026, Crown-Indigenous Relations and Northern Affairs Canada (CIRNAC) has provided $284.2 million to 165 community-led initiatives to target TRC Calls to Action 74 to 76, regarding missing children and burial information. Of these, 88 communities are using the funding to conduct technical fieldwork, but most agreements use a mix of methodologies to document and honour the lives taken away by the residential school system, such as archival research, knowledge gathering using survivor testimonies and memorialization ceremonies. 

CIRNAC spokesperson Jennifer Cooper emphasized the importance of Indigenous-led decision-making on these projects. 

“The choice of families or communities — and it must be their choice — to exhume and perform more intrusive forensic activities is a very sensitive and private matter requiring consensus from the families and communities whose children were sent to a given residential school,” Cooper wrote in a statement to the IJF. 

Using archival research, Survivors’ Secretariat has formally identified more than 6,200 children from more than 60 different Indigenous communities who passed through the Mohawk Institute Indian Residential School — known as “the Mush Hole” for its poor food quality — in Brantford, Ontario. 

In addition to poor and inconsistent funding, Arndt cites barriers to accessing information from government agencies as a key obstacle to the initiative’s work to identify and locate missing children.

On Sept. 19, 2027, thousands of survivor testimonies collected under the Indian Residential Schools Settlement Agreement (IRSSA) will be destroyed, per a Supreme Court ruling. Through the IRSSA’s Independent Assessment Process (IAP) in 2012, nearly 38,000 survivors shared their experiences of abuse at residential schools. Stressing the IAP’s promise of confidentiality, the Supreme Court ruled in 2017 that the files be destroyed after a 15-year retention period to protect the survivors’ privacy, as opposed to archiving the records under the Library and Archives of Canada Act. 

Individual claimants – many of whom have passed away since giving testimonies – may request to preserve their files, but the National Commission for Truth and Reconciliation says they’ve received only 96 IAP files so far. 

Although Arndt acknowledges that the testimonies were painful and personal, she stresses the irreplaceable value of the smallest details from those interviews in identifying other children and potential crimes committed at residential schools.  

“It doesn’t mean we should get to look at every recording of an IAP interview,” Arndt said. “The reason we are wanting the records preserved is to connect some of the truths they’ve experienced and the violence with other young people that we can’t find, or if the violence they witnessed was against another child.”

The group has been compiling the list of over 6,200 identified children who passed through the Mohawk Institute into a database accessible by request to families and related community members. Arndt said the project hopes to “return the memories of those children to their communities,” while respecting privacy laws and Indigenous-led grief ceremonies.

“Communities and families were robbed of the right to say ‘no.’ If you said ‘no’ to your child being taken, you could go to jail, you could be charged, you could see your rations denied,” she said, explaining the decision not to release the database for broad public and academic use. 

“Now if we find who these children are, we can protect them.” 

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