| Back in 2021, the discovery of evidence of unmarked graves for as many as 200 Indigenous children on the site of a former boarding school in Kamloops, British Columbia, shook the ground. It brought attention to the hundreds of other current and former boarding schools across Canada and the US, and to the question of how best to acknowledge and atone for the atrocities perpetrated against Indigenous people. To make the discovery, officials used ground-penetrating radar (GPR), among other tools, to create a map of what lay below ground. And so the revelation also marked a shift in the use of forensic technology and questions about what role it should play in that broader effort toward healing. Among Indigenous communities, the demand for this type of technology and the people who know how to use it grew. Around the same time, Marsha Small, who had by then spent years learning how to use GPR, was developing a set of protocols "to protect tribes from placing their faith in the technology without a clear sense of what it could deliver." In a ranging and thoughtful feature published online this week, Rowan Moore Gerety traces Small's journey to becoming one of the very few Indigenous practitioners of this forensic technology, and thus someone with a special understanding of what it can do to help people heal from historical wounds—and what it can't do. Moore Gerety witnessed Marsha Small as she led an excavation at the Red Cloud Indian School in South Dakota, a school founded by Jesuits in the 19th century. One eyewitness account and plenty of folk stories—not to mention the real abuse that students endured—had led some people to believe that children were buried in the basement of one of the school's buildings. What Small and her team found complicates that version of events, but it still may not yield a simple explanation for what happened. What can tools like ground-penetrating radar do for us? As Small says, "We need the numbers, but I'm not concerned with the numbers. I want the healing to happen." – Matthew McKnight | Features Editor |
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