Focus on fact of residential school deaths

I am an archeologist. It's a field that I was initially drawn to because it felt comfortably distant from the things that got people upset. I couldn't have been more wrong.

- PAUL RACHER

When doctors and bureaucrats pointed to the fact that kids in residential schools were dying at a higher rate than their settler counterparts, Ottawa rarely acted, Paul Racher writes.

In recent years, we archeologists have found ourselves drawn into deeply acrimonious debates about Canada's history with Indigenous Peoples. It makes sense. Our profession puts us into a physical encounter with the past. We collect evidence.

Recent articles in some corners of the media landscape have made much of the fact that the number of suspected graves at the former Kamloops Indian Residential School in British Columbia has been revised downward. Indeed, some columnists have gone so far as to suggest this proves the Indian Residential School system was not genocidal and that Canada has been libeled.

Much of the discussion has centred on ground penetrating radar (GPR), a remote sensing technology. I was not involved with the work at Kamloops, but I can summarize my experience with GPR as follows: It's hard. It isn't like an MRI. It's more like radar was in the 1930s. It can identify anomalies in the soil, but it rarely indicates if they are natural or human-made. Accordingly, GPR is useful, but tends to work best in conjunction with other forms of evidence.