Over four days last May, members of the Tk'emlúps te Secwépemc — a First Nations community in the interior of British Columbia — oversaw a site survey of around two acres of land surrounding the province's former Kamloops Indian Residential School.
Using an electromagnetic technology called ground penetrating radar (GPR), an archeology professor charted what appeared to be the grave shafts of 215 children lying below the ground. The technology furthered the long-held suspicion that there were remains of missing children hidden on the land of the school. Former students at the school recall being woken at night to dig graves, for example, and a child's rib bone and a juvenile tooth had surfaced in the area. Kamloops was the largest of the 139 government-sanctioned residential schools in the country that operated between the 1880s and 1990s. The facilities separated 150,000 Indigenous children from their families and educated them in English or French while banning native languages and indoctrinating them into Christianity.
