Tristin Hopper: Kamloops residential school ‘graves’ could have been septic pipes all along

Five years after the explosive announcement of 215 children's graves, the only way to know what's under the ground is to excavate.

A drawing of the septic field at the Kamloops Indian Residential School that includes dotted lines (bottom right) that show the disposal beds near where suspected unmarked graves were found with ground-penetrating radar. Photo by Library and Archives Canada

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Less than two months after Tk’emlúps te Secwépemc issued the explosive announcement on May 27, 2021 that they’d uncovered the “remains of 215 children” at the former Kamloops Indian Residential School, they hosted a press conference admitting that they’d gotten the number wrong.

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At the time, flags were half-masted across the country, and would remain so into November. News outlets around the world were reporting that Canada had uncovered a whole field of dead missing children. The figure “215” had been emblazoned across countless memorials and solidarity statements.

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It had also been a feature of several vandalism attacks targeting Christian churches. Before a mob pulled down a Toronto statue of Egerton Ryerson, they first spray-painted it with the moniker “215.”

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Just the week prior to the press conference, Tk’emlúps te Secwépemc Chief Rosanne Casimir had introduced resolutions at the Assembly of First Nations calling the discovery a “mass grave” and citing it as evidence of a “genocide inflicted upon Indigenous Peoples by the State in partnership with the churches.”

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But now, on July 15, 2021, news media were told that there were actually 15 fewer suspected graves than initially reported.

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A makeshift memorial outside the former Kamloops Indian Residential School in Kamloops, British Columbia, Canada, on Sept. 1, 2021. Photo by COLE BURSTON /AFP via Getty Images

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Sarah Beaulieu, the ground-penetrating radar technician whose report had yielded the initial 215 figure, said she had since received information that her survey had accidentally counted a series of prior archaeological digs.

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Between 1991 and 2004, land surrounding the former Kamloops Indian Residential School had been excavated by a Simon Fraser University team. The work involved digging “shovel test pits” and then screening the soil for bone tools, fire pits and other evidence of pre-contact Indigenous use.

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And apparently, some of those test pits had been incorrectly pinged as suspected graves.

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“I had to rule out where those excavations had taken place in the late 90s, early 2000s,” said Beaulieu. “After this review it was determined that there remain 200 targets of interest.”

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Unmentioned at the two-hour press conference was the arguably far more relevant information that the area of the Kamloops Indian Residential School grounds they had surveyed also lay atop a historic septic system.

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In fact, the survey site may have been overtop the system’s “disposal beds,” a structure consisting of a latticework of clay pipes, installed in 1926 and laid out in an east-west orientation. The details of the system were easy to find. The plans, purchase order and correspondence related to the septic field are all held in the archives of the National Centre for Truth and Reconciliation.

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An excerpt from an engineer’s report for the septic field at Kamloops Indian Residential School. Photo by Library and Archives Canada

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The 30-page report even details the precise depth at which the tiles were installed.

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“The original intention was to lay this land tile at a depth of 18 (inches) only below the surface to provide better aeration of the soil, but the nature of the ground was found after excavation had been commenced to be such that a greater depth was considered necessary,” wrote project engineer E.H. Tredcroft.

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Instead, the report writes, the pipe was “laid 3’6” below the surface of the ground.”

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While Beaulieu did not mention the historic septic system, she did mention how strange it was that the suspected graves were all identified as lying at a depth of about 800 centimetres, roughly two-and-a-half feet.

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She described this as being because the graves were likely dug by children, and dug in the winter, when the ground was frozen.

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“It fits with the knowledge-keepers’ descriptions of children having to dig graves,” she said.

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She also mentioned that the suspected graves all seemed to follow an “east-west” orientation, which she said was consistent with “typical Christian burial traditions.”

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The survey that yielded the explosive 215 claim — and everything that followed — was conducted using a machine primarily intended to detect buried pipes.

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Beaulieu had used an LMX200 ground penetrating radar system. The product’s promotional materials make no mention of forensic applications, marketing it primarily as a tool for utilities and municipal governments to detect pipes, cables and “septic system components.”

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This isn’t to say that ground-penetrating radar isn’t used to uncover things like missing graves, but the LMX200 can only deliver the most basic underground images.

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This is shown in the handful of survey images that Beaulieu released in July 2021, and which are now in a slideshow on the website of the Canadian Archaeological Association.

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A slide from Sarah Beaulieu’s report. Photo by Canadian Archaeological Association

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She published three screenshots of the DynaQ software used with the LMX200. The images all show semi-circular disturbances at depths of less than one metre, each of them denoted with the label “probable burial.”

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The vagaries of the technology are part of why, when the Truth and Reconciliation Commission’s final report was published in 2015, it specifically cautioned against jumping to conclusions based on ground-penetrating radar surveys of former Indian Residential Schools.

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Volume four of the report, entitled Missing Children and Unmarked Burials, listed ground-penetrating radar as one of several technologies that could be used to help map suspected cemeteries.

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“However these methods seldom produce results that are immediately and intuitively interpretable, and often require supplemental evaluation,” it read, adding that any suspected anomalies would need to be subjected to “post-survey validity testing” via excavation.

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A slide from Sarah Beaulieu’s report. Photo by Canadian Archaeological Association

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In a 2009 case subsequently profiled in the Canadian Society of Forensic Science Journal, the Edmonton Police employed ground-penetrating radar in an attempt to find a missing child.

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The survey, performed in the basement of a residential home, yielded results consistent with a buried body. But when the spot was excavated, it revealed only the aftermath of a water leak.

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“We did not find any evidence that it ever contained a body,” Michael Billinger, the case’s consulting forensic anthropologist, told National Post via email.

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“Due to its relatively low resolution, GPR may produce similar signatures for different types of subsurface objects or disturbances located at comparable depths,” he added.

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On the specific point of whether a septic pipe could resemble a human burial, Billinger said that it could “produce subsurface disturbances that appear similar to other anomalies detected by GPR.”

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A slide from Sarah Beaulieu’s report. Photo by Canadian Archaeological Association

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In the 2000s, the school board in New Westminster, B.C., commissioned a series of ground-penetrating radar surveys of the future New Westminster Secondary School for the specific purpose of finding suspected graves since the site was adjacent to several known pioneer cemeteries.

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Initial GPR readings by Golder Associates found 38 “potential gravesites.”  But when the most compelling anomalies were “ground-truthed,” they yielded only cobbles, boulders or PVC pipes.

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“No gravesites or burial-related features were located, and no other evidence of historic cemetery use was observed within the Project Area as a result of field investigations,” read a June 2017 final report.

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Jamie Pringle, a reader in forensic geoscience at the U.K.’s Keele University, has published more than a dozen papers detailing searches for unmarked burials and even mass graves using ground-penetrating radar. Pringle told the National Post that just in the last year, he’s encountered multiple instances of a radar survey appearing to show a burial, only for the anomaly to be something benign.

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“I’ve completed a few cold case searches for a few U.K. police forces this year and anomalies have turned out to be a big tree root and air gaps beneath a concrete floor respectively, so not what we were looking for essentially,” he said by email. 

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One such case covered by Pringle was published last year in the journal Forensic Science International. Tipped off by a prison informant, police were attempting to locate the unmarked grave of a missing child. “The most obvious GPR anomaly we imaged turning out to be a field ceramic drainage pipe once being intrusively investigated,” said Pringle. 

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“Anomalies can be caused by many near-surface buried objects, not always what you are looking for, and you can’t be definitive of the causative object until you physically investigate and dig it up,” he said. 

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Jan Francke is the Canadian founder of Groundradar, a ground-penetrating radar contractor in business since 1994.

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He told National Post that an open field, such as that surveyed in Kamloops, is going to be replete with possible false positives.

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“In an open field, every single rock, every single buried piece of wood, they all give you a similar signature as a burial. So how do we discriminate between a burial and a false positive? We have to look for signs of soil disturbances, and those are difficult to see and not themselves definitive,” he said.

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Francke added, “the hypothesis that this is somehow related to a septic field is plausible.”

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The reason Beaulieu conducted her survey where she did was because of something she has subsequently referred to as “the knowing.”

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“Cultural protocols, and oral tellings are as equally important as the science behind remote sensing,” she wrote in the slideshow now featured on the website of the Canadian Archaeological Association.

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“This fact — the knowing — has been recognized by Indigenous communities for generations.”

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It’s something that would be mentioned in the initial press statement announcing that the “remains of 215 children” had been confirmed in Kamloops. The statement called the discovery confirmation of an “unthinkable loss that was spoken about but never documented.”

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“We had a knowing in our community that we were able to verify,” was the included quote by Casimir subsequently published in hundreds of press accounts around the world.

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Chief Rosanne Casimir at the site of the former Kamloops Indian Residential School. Photo by COLE BURSTON /AFP via Getty Images

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Even Canadian anthropologists would come out publicly to say that respecting this “knowing” was more important than material verification of the claims they represented. On the same day as the July 15 press conference, the University of Alberta’s Institute of Prairie and Indigenous Archaeology released a “solidarity statement” saying that Beaulieu’s findings were “strongly indicative of burial locations.” 

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It added, “survivors and Indigenous communities have been speaking the truth of their experiences in so-called ‘residential schools’ and related institutions for decades; it should not have taken the use of scientific techniques for the necessary attention to be paid to the truth of what happened to the survivors and to the children who never came home.”

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The “knowing” refers to accounts told by former students at Kamloops Indian Residential School that, throughout the 1950s and 1960s, holes were being dug in the school’s apple orchard and children thrown into them.

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One of the mandates of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission was to record the names of children known to have died at Indian Residential Schools, mostly due to infectious diseases such as tuberculosis. An official memorial page maintained by the National Centre for Truth and Reconciliation lists 63 names for the Kamloops school, with dates of death ranging from 1899 to 1962.

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The Kamloops Indian Residential School, circa 1930. Photo by ARCHIVES DESCHÂTELETS-NDC RICHE /PNG

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But the apple orchard burials were supposed to be missing children not captured by official records. What Casimir would call “undocumented deaths.”

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Accounts of the apple orchard burials were profiled in an episode of CBC’s Fifth Estate broadcast in 2022.

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Entitled Down in the Apple Orchard, it interviewed former students of Kamloops Indian Residential School who said they’d heard of burials or holes from relatives or fellow students.

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One interviewee described overhearing a conversation in the boys’ dorm. “We’re going to go steal apples, and then one night, one of the guys says no, we shouldn’t. That’s where they’re burying people,” he said.

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Another interviewee said his uncle had told him that boys at the school were forced to dig holes in the orchard during the 1950s, and that the holes corresponded with children going missing. “Dig a hole, somebody’s missing, dig a hole, somebody’s missing,” he said.

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The former Kamloops Indian Residential School on June 5, 2021. Photo by COLE BURSTON /AFP via Getty Images

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Tk’emlúps te Secwépemc no longer says in public statements that they have found confirmed burials. In a 2024 statement, they described the events of 2021 as being when “the confirmation of 215 anomalies were detected.”

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The official Parks Canada description of Kamloops Indian Residential School also doesn’t contain any definitive claims of clandestine burials.

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A description of the site’s apple orchard says it’s the spot where “Survivors’ testimony has indicated contains unmarked burials.” The write-up also said the school was an agent of what “Survivors understand as genocide.”

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Tk’emlúps te Secwépemc’s most recent statement on the apple orchard anomalies, issued just last February, said they haven’t ground-truthed any of the suspected graves, and they may never do so. The Globe and Mail reported last week that the First Nation is aiming to excavate the site in 2027.

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Since children from 38 First Nations had attended Kamloops Indian Residential School, the February statement said that any archaeological work would need to be preceded by consensus from all 38.

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