Grant: College & Community Social Innovation Fund

Saskatchewan Polytechnic is requesting funding from NSERC's College and Community Innovation Program - College and Community Social Innovation Fund (CCSIF) for the applied research project "Identification of Residential School Cemeteries using Remote Sensing Technologies." Saskatchewan Polytechnic is prioritizing Reconciliation projects like this one and has worked with Indigenous communities in the past, including the Cowessess First Nation. The project would be a proof of concept testing the feasibility of using remote sensing technologies, specifically unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV) with imaging payloads, and Ground Penetration Radars (GPR) to locate unidentified and unmarked graves sites in the vicinity of Residential Schools. If successful, it could provide a set of foundational procedures for the location and identification of unmarked/unidentified graves, and could potentially provide general details about burial remains at these sites. This in turn will help to determine the spatial extent of cemeteries and the number of graves within them. An accurate assessment of the number and size of graves will be used determine the number of people buried in cemeteries. Any attempt to identify individuals is beyond the scope of this project. Upon successful proof of the concept, an efficient and effective solution for identification of unmarked/unidentified graves in remote locations using remote sensing techniques will be proposed. This efficient solution, using different remote sensing technologies, will produce superior results as compared with the use of only GPR. With proper training, different Indigenous communities would be able to use this easy to use UAV solution to determined the extent of unmarked/unidentified graves in their respective areas. The proposed solution can also potentially be used for forensic investigations and archaeological applications.