Dogs being used to search former residential school sites in northern Ontario
The results of recent searches of other former residential schools in the north have not been made public
Two former residential schools near Chapleau are being searched using ground-penetrating radar, as well as specially trained dogs.
St. John's Indian Residential School run by the Anglican church opened near the small northern Ontario town in 1907, moved to a new location in 1920, before closing for good in 1948.
Three area First Nations— Chapleau Cree, Chapleau Ojibwe and Brunswick House— are overseeing the search for possible graves. The students of the school came from 33 different Indigenous communities.
Deanna Dixon, the lead from Chapleau Cree, says ground-penetrating radar is being used to probe a designated cemetery off Highway 101 that was used during the later days of the school.
There are some markers among the mature trees in the cemetery, but it isn't known for sure who is buried there or where exactly the graves are.
The original site of the school, right across the river from Chapleau, is overgrown with thick bush and not suitable for radar scans, so Dixon says this week, they are bringing in human remains detection dogs.
"With the amount of records that we have, the record-keeping wasn't the greatest, so we have estimated about 100 student deaths that we are looking to make sure that we have all the accurate information so those students can be memorialized," she said.
"The more that the community knows about the truth about what happened at these institutions, the closer we'll be to making that impact of what the intention of reconciliation is to be."
Several members of Dixon's family attended residential school and she said she finds the work "very sobering."
"Thinking about the survivors ... they always wanted to make sure that the children who didn't come home, weren't being left behind in our consciousness," she said.
"To be able to try and answer some of those long-standing questions is something that needs to be thought of in a very delicate way."
The grounds of the former Shingwauk residential school in Sault Ste. Marie, as well as St. Anne's school in Fort Albany have been searched with radar in recent years.
But the results of those scans have not yet been released to the public.