Meet the indigenous archeologist tracking down the missing residential children
OTTAWA, Ontario — At 15, Kisha Supernant knew exactly what she wanted to do with the rest of her life: become an archaeologist and study ancient civilizations.
She achieved her teenage goal. But her latest work has put her at the center of discussions in modern-day Canada — not about the distant past — but about the more recent history of the country’s Indigenous populations.
Since the end of May, several Indigenous communities have announced that the use of ground-penetrating radar has identified well over 1,000 human remains, mostly of children, at former sites of the residential schools where thousands of children were forcibly sent by the government to assimilate. Many of those children never returned home.
The discoveries have shocked Canadians and opened a new conversation with Indigenous people about the history of the schools, the last of which closed in 1996. And Supernant — who specializes in the use of technology to map and analyze settlements — is the archaeologist who first worked with Indigenous communities to find the remains.
Supernant is Métis, one of relatively few Indigenous archaeologists in Canada. She has dedicated her career to redefining how the profession interacts with Indigenous people.
“The past few months have been very, very intense,” Supernant said from her home in Edmonton, Alberta, where she heads the Institute of Prairie and Indigenous Archaeology at the University of Alberta. “I really feel strongly that this is a calling.”
The archaeological field in Canada, as elsewhere, has a history of insensitive practices. In Canada, human remains and artifacts were callously moved to distant museums. Research often provided a veneer for claims of white racial superiority by scientists and politicians. Supernant said it was a transformative change to see Indigenous communities turning to archaeologists to help them find their loved ones.
In the past, “it was folks going in and taking stuff without talking to a single Indigenous person and telling Indigenous stories without involving Indigenous people,” she said.
Growing up, Supernant, who is 40, didn’t know she was Métis, she said. But she knew she descended from an Indigenous group. “We knew we were something, but we didn’t know exactly who our relations were for a very long time.”
Robert, her father, was not forced to attend a residential school. But he did not escape the child welfare system, which many Indigenous people say continues to disproportionately disrupt their families. His mother, Betty Supernant, was unmarried when she became pregnant with him, and Robert Supernant was taken away from her at birth, ultimately never knowing her. He was raised in a series of foster homes.
Robert Supernant eventually made his way to Victoria, the capital of British Columbia, where he met Kisha Supernant’s mother, Shanti, whose ancestry is British.
“My mom and dad were both quite alternative, kind of into the New Age movement,” Kisha Supernant said. “We lived in a cult for a few years.”
Supernant did her undergraduate studies at the University of British Columbia, and earned a master’s at the University of Toronto. She returned to the University of British Columbia for a doctorate in archaeology. Along the way, she began meeting other Indigenous people who helped fill in some blanks in her heritage.
“I had no understanding of really what the Métis were,” she said. “I think it was just like: ‘Oh, it means I’m mixed.’ But I didn’t really understand that we have a culture and a language and all that kind of thing.”
When she moved to Edmonton, her father’s birthplace, Métis groups reconnected her with family members, including an uncle whose existence neither she nor her father had been aware of.
In addition to researching the histories of Indigenous people, Supernant has written on the need for archaeologists to shape their studies to make Indigenous people partners in the research, not just objects of study. She also has worked to change the language of archaeology; instead of human remains, she talks about ancestors, while artifacts are belongings.
“It’s easy in the world of archaeology to focus on things and to forget that they are really just reflections of people, and that’s the true purpose of archaeologists, to understand those people,” said Andrew Martin, a professor of archaeology at the University of British Columbia who collaborates with Supernant. “I’m not Indigenous, I’m very distant from that experience. And so I need to listen.”
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