The Lost Graves of Muskowekwan

HUNDREDS OF MISSING CHILDREN, A CENTURIES-LONG COVER-UP, AND THE RADAR TECHNOLOGY THAT HELPED EXPOSE A NATION'S HORRIFYING SECRET HISTORY.

- LUKE OTTENHOF

The wind picks up in the afternoon around Muskowekwan Residential School in rural Saskatchewan. When late summer storms blow in across the flat, grassy plains around the deserted school building, they lash the cottonwood trees that line the road leading up to it and whip through the school's shattered windows and peeled-paint hallways. Sometimes, funnel clouds stretch their fingers down from the sky to graze the fields below. Prairie storms are no joke.

Dr. Kisha Supernant knows this. When the archaeologist and director of the University of Alberta's Institute of Prairie and Indigenous Archaeology spends five days in August 2021 at Muskowekwan to search the fields behind the school for unmarked burials using ground-penetrating radar, or GPR, she and her team are closely tuned to the weather. Standing in a field with radar equipment and metal stakes becomes a workplace hazard when dark clouds roll in.

Yet the specter of the violent weather isn't the most chilling element on the Muskowekwan First Nation's land. It's the school building itself, a hulking collection of red bricks that haunts the landscape. Birds chirp from inside, and the building's bones rattle and creak in the breeze. It makes the hair stand up on the back of Supernant's neck. "It has its own power," she says.

Muskowekwan is one of 139 former residential schools across Canada. For over 160 years, the Canadian government and the Catholic church operated the schools to assimilate more than 150,000 Indigenous children. It's estimated that 6,000 of those children died from disease, fires, drowning, suicide, and other causes. Canadian magazine