Last fall, a group of grade 11 and 12 physics and biology high school students from Souris joined us at our Test Site for a lesson on geophysical surveying methods and the opportunity to gain some hands-on experience. The students were split up into three groups, that rotated between stations every 20 minutes.
Station one gave the students a quick explanation of Ground Penetrating Radar (GPR) and how it is used in the search for unmarked graves. The students then had the opportunity to push the GPR cart around the Test Site (which is used by our team as a control site, therefore there are no unmarked graves in this area but rather objects that have been buried for comparative analysis) and look for ground disturbances in real time on the screen.
The second station demonstrated the use of metal detectors. The students were then given the opportunity to use the metal detectors and search for metal objects that were buried previously by our team.
The third station provided the students with a history of the residential school system in Canada and the Brandon Residential School. The students learned about the importance of archival documents in research and how this information helps to gives the children of residential school systems an identity, allowing for the proper honouring and memorization of the children. The students were able to visit the North Hill Cemetery and leave tobacco ties and candy as an offering for those who are buried there.
Our team is grateful to have had the opportunity to share surveying methods, archival research, and a history of the Brandon Residential School with the Souris students and thank them for their respect and kindness during their visit.
We would like to encourage high school science or history teachers to reach out to us at birsinvestigation@svdngovernance.com if they are interested in organizing a similar trip to the Brandon Residential School site to learn more about geophysical surveying methods and residential schools in Canada.
Thank you to the Souris high school classes! (faces blurred)
In November 2025, Ling and I travelled to Ottawa to visit Library and Archives Canada and the Canadian Museum of History. This was an important trip in order to access documents that are not available online or electronically.
Canadian Museum of History. (Image from the Canadian Museum of History Website)
On our third and final day in Ottawa, we went to the Canadian Museum of History, located across the bridge in Gatineau, Quebec. There we meet with the Curator of Indigenous Histories and Contemporary Cultures, who had helped to oversee the process of accessing archival documents on the Oak River/Sioux Valley Dakota Nation area. The purpose of our visit was to access a collection of textual archives that were donated to the museum decades ago by two American researchers who had visited Oak River in 1914, 1951, and 1952 to learn about Canadian Dakotas on the prairies.
One of the researchers was particularly interested in the ways of Dakota women and spent much time interviewing women in the Oak River area, with the intent of writing a book on the subject. While a book was never published, the collected information remains in boxes in the museums archival room.
The Canadian Museum of History has kindly offered to digitize the contents of these boxes and share them with Sioux Valley Dakota Nation community members, who can review the material and reconnect with it. The records contain tens of thousands of pages of cultural and traditional material, stories, photographs, and letters, some of which may be considered sensitive; therefore, our team has made the decision to limit our interaction with these records. Our goal is to index the contents as quickly as possible and prepare them for review by community members.
A new committee is being formed in the community strictly for reviewing these documents and providing guidance and feedback on the access, storage, and dissemination of this information. If you or someone you know from Sioux Valley Dakota Nation is interested in joining this committee, please contact NAME at PHONE NUMBER or EMAIL for more details. Binders of printed material can also be viewed or checked out from the Governance Building. As this is ongoing project with the Canadian Museum of History, we expect to receive more digitized material soon and will make it accessible to the committee as soon as possible.
Reflections on a Research Visit to Library and Archives Canada, November 2025
-Ling Jin
Getting to Ottawa from Winnipeg is never simple. One flight a day per airline, fares that are almost always expensive, and almost no flexibility when your research schedule depends on booking specific consultation slots at Library and Archives Canada (LAC). For our research team, this is not just a logistical inconvenience, it is a recurring reminder that accessing the records held there is, from the very first step, weighted against researchers based outside major eastern cities. We made the trip in November 2025 anyway. What followed was a mix of institutional frustration and, in one unexpected moment, something genuinely moving.
Getting There
The cost and inflexibility of flying from Winnipeg to Ottawa deserves to be named plainly. One flight a day per airline means that a delay or cancellation does not just inconvenience you, it can eliminate an entire day of reserved reading room access that may have taken weeks to book. The fares compound this, creating a quiet but real barrier for researchers working on limited institutional travel budgets. Geography should not determine who gets to do this work, but right now, it does. That is a systemic problem that institutions like LAC have a role in addressing.
Two of us, Ashley Austin and I (Ling Jin), from the Brandon Residential School Missing Children Investigation Project decided to take an alternative route to avoid the risk of delays and cancellations on the direct service. We drove to Winnipeg Airport and flew to Toronto in the early morning, a route offered far more frequently than the Winnipeg-to-Ottawa service, then took the UP Express train onward to Ottawa. It involves more steps, but it is cheaper and takes roughly the same amount of time overall. For researchers on a tight travel budget, it is a route worth knowing about.
Library and Archives Canada
Navigating the Building — and the Institution
Once inside LAC, the challenges shifted from logistical to operational. Different record types are held in different rooms, and it is not always clear where to go or who to ask. This would be manageable with a consistent point of contact, but staffing rotation meant a different person each day. Every visit required re-explaining our research, re-establishing context, and in some cases re-navigating requests that had already been made. Staff responsibilities also appeared unclear at times: it was not always evident who held authority over a particular retrieval or who to follow up with when something did not arrive as expected.
For researchers working with complex, multi-series collections, particularly residential school records, this kind of inconsistency costs more than time. It erodes confidence in the process and makes it harder to plan meaningful research in advance. Consistency and clear staff accountability are not small asks. They are the foundation of functional archival access.
The ATIP Release That Was Not What We Expected
One of the more frustrating moments came from an ATIP request we had submitted specifically to review records in person at LAC. Instead, the release came 4 months late, in digital form, and with all names redacted. For those outside this field: names in residential school records are not incidental data. They are the entire point. They connect a document to a child, a family, a community. Receiving a digitized file with names blanked out, on records over 90 years old for individuals whose loved ones are eager to get more information of, felt like a door being opened halfway and then held shut. We had followed the proper process, made the proper request, and still received incomplete disclosure. It is a pattern that is well documented, and one that urgently needs to change.
Redacted File
An Unexpected Discovery
And then, amid all of it, something wonderful happened.
In the course of our retrieval work, we came across a vinyl record of a Sioux Valley powwow, an audio recording we had not known existed and had not anticipated finding. It stopped us completely. Here, held quietly in the archives, was a recording of community, of ceremony, of life, something no written register or quarterly return could ever capture. It was a genuine surprise, and a reminder of why this work matters and what these holdings can contain when access is truly possible.
That discovery does not erase the frustrations of the trip. But it reinforces something important: there is far more in these archives than has been made accessible, and the communities whose histories live in these records deserve full, consistent, and properly supported access to all of it.
Looking Ahead
A research visit to LAC should not require navigating expensive and inflexible travel, daily staffing changes, unclear institutional processes, and incomplete ATIP releases just to do the work. These are solvable problems, and they need to be solved. For researchers working on Indigenous history, every barrier to access is also a barrier to truth, and to the people these records ultimately belong to.
We will be going back. We hope it is easier next time, for us, and for every researcher making the long trip to get there.
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