GRASSY NARROWS – The project to search for unmarked graves on the grounds of the closed McIntosh Indian Residential School has surveyed four hectares (10 acres) of land so far.
But the school property comprised more than 840 hectares, Wiikwogaming Tiinahtiisiiwin Project consultant Janalee Jodouin said Wednesday.
“It is the start of bringing the children home,” she said. “And that’s what this is about: bringing the children home. This is the beginning.”
Additional ground searches are planned but require continued support from the federal government, the project said in a recent news release.
The area that needs to be investigated on the ground could be narrowed down considerably by high-tech aerial surveying – but that, too, is dependent on funding, she said.
The Wiikwogaming Tiinahtiisiiwin Project conducted a visual search and used ground-penetrating radar (GPR) on a small portion of the former McIntosh Residential School property in September.
A visual survey of four hectares identified “a significant number of unmarked burials,” a news release from Wiikwogaming stated.
A GPR survey of about half a hectare “confirmed the context of the depressions identified during the visual survey,” the release said.
Jodouin said there are no numbers to share right now because GPR data hasn’t been fully analyzed.
GPR investigation is a fairly slow and expensive process, Jodouin said.
The project hopefully will be able to use the faster but also expensive LiDAR – light detection and ranging – to speed up surveying of the McIntosh grounds, she added.
LiDAR surveying is typically performed by aircraft sending pulsed laser to ground level. The data that bounces back to a scanner on the aricraft is used to generate three-dimensional imaging of the ground surface.
LiDAR mapping would help narrow down the area that needs inspection by, for instance, eliminating places where there couldn’t be burial sites because of rock formations.
From 1925 until 1969, children from Grassy Narrows (Asubpeeschoseewagong) and other first nations in the region were sent to the McIntosh school, founded by Roman Catholic missionaries
The federal government capped funding for residential schools initiatives such as Wiikwogaming Tiinahtiisiiwin in July, but then announced in August that it had lifted the cap.
