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Comment by soperj | Hacker News Reader

Sorry, you do have a current record of how many children died at that school? or no?

There are records from that school, yes. Are there enough to account for fictional numbers? No, why would there be?

Do you understand how perilous counting "graves? with ground radar is? Note that the people who actually did the study are very careful with their language, noting that they found ground anomalies. The actual correlation with that and graves is incredibly loose.

The "error rate" cited today by Cowessess First Nation and their partnered technical teams was 10% to 15%. The ground penetrating radar technology does not merely look for "ground anomalies", they work to specifically identify burial shafts, which tend to be rather distinctive. To say that they are merely counting any "anomaly" as a "fictional" grave is misrepresenting the work being done.

It is positively impossible to cite such an error rate with any accuracy without doing an archeological analysis to determine the ground truth for a given site, which hasn't remotely been done (and in all likelihood would be blocked by the relevant players). Any claims to the contrary are simply a lie.

Ground radar grave analysis has a significant degree of reading tea leaves.

https://www.sensoft.ca/blog/cemetery-data-grave-locator-find...

GPR is a great tool for law enforcement to find possible disturbed soil sites. Its use declines when you're doing mass surveys unless it is merely guiding a dig.

> which hasn't remotely been done

How do you know this?

You either have specific knowledge of the scans and any associated archeological analysis done in BC and Sask, or you don't. What specific information do you have about the lack of analysis done in the Balcarres area?

The Sensoft link has nothing to do with what has been done in BC nor Sask.

It is identical to the technique done at the school sites. Very low cost hardware is used to sweep an area and then read the tea leaves of electromagnetic response waves. It is enough of a red flag when the people doing the survey make a big deal about such obstacles as clearing brush and grass.

> How do you know this?

How do I know that they haven't done an archeological dig to validate the accuracy of their scans? Because they explicitly have said so. Indeed, they've said they may never, and I would wager will never.

I said nothing about the "lack" of analysis, I'm just saying that you, like so many others, are incredibly accepting about information flowing through multiple parties, some of whom have a strong incentive to lean a certain way. The deficiencies of ground penetrating radar is very well known -- it's a very powerful tool, but read the words of the technicians who did it compared to the tribe spokespeople. They talk about anomalies, and how they have tried to be careful in the language they use (specifically noting that they can't say something is a grave, just that the patterns look similar to "a grave shaft").

How many grave locations do you think the team that did this survey have done? Have many tests of their claims? How has the rigor of their claims been validated?

> It is identical to the technique done at the school sites. Very low cost hardware is used to sweep an area and then read the tea leaves of electromagnetic response waves.

What hardware is being used by the school sites? Can you provide more information about what specific GPR hardware that was used on Cowesess?

> but read the words of the technicians who did it compared to the tribe spokespeople

I can't find any of the information you mentioned about the technicians in this latest finds describing the GPR and the hedging language used. Maybe my Google skills suck. Can you provide a link to that as well? I was under the impression that the technicians at Cowessess have not made any public statements so far when it comes to the technology being used, methods, background work, etc.

There are records from that school that the former administrators of that school are refusing to release. The paper trail regarding who they specifically are and how many they specifically are is being intentionally obscured.

Additionally, access to that property is pretty heavily restricted.

Edit: Please note I was specifically talking about the school in Kamloops and, actually, just yesterday a sharing agreement was reached as per my follow up comment below.

Which property are you talking about? A number of these sites have been under aboriginal control for decades.

I was talking about Kamloops specifically but actually, googling, it looks like the order that staffed the school just signed on to better record sharing[1] - this is a new story to me so there may be some problematic limitations on access I'm not aware of but it looks like things are at least moving in a good direction. I had been talking about the Sisters of St. Anne as detailed here[2] - but yea according to the above article this is no longer correct.

1. https://globalnews.ca/news/7975128/catholic-order-bc-residen...

2. https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/british-columbia/catholic-ord...

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