Class of ‘25: Using community-driven archaeology to explore Indigenous removal

For his dissertation, Liam Wadsworth used high-tech archaeological techniques to examine the land surrounding the Cold Lake Air Weapons Range (CLAWR). It’s an area steeped in Indigenous history, now further supported through the results of the team’s work.

Indigenous people were forcibly removed from the land in the mid-20th century as the government wanted to build an air weapons range amid growing fears of a potential Soviet Union attack. 

On the surface of the sites, Wadsworth identified the foundations of former cabins, along with pots and pans, remnants of canned goods and, in one case, a trap sitting against what once had been a wall.

“It was like everyone got up during dinner and left,” he says. 

While archaeological work is often portrayed as exploring a very distant past, Wadsworth’s work examines more recent events with direct ripple effects into modern communities. And that’s the type of work that most resonates with him — he wants to tell the hidden stories, those deliberately missing from history books.

“These landscapes are filled with trauma, whether that’s from lies that were perpetuated or whether it’s losing access to sacred places like Cold Lake First Nations,” says Wadsworth. “But in difficulty, I find meaning. There’s a purpose in this work I find very fulfilling.”

In his second year as an undergrad, he worked for the Ontario Heritage Trust and designed his own research project that employed geophysics and remote sensing to look for unmarked graves of freedom seekers — slaves who had escaped through the Underground Railroad in the mid-1800s.

Wadsworth couldn’t have known that experience would lay the foundations for his career going forward. He used the skills he gained through the project as soon as he moved west to the University of Alberta and started working with his supervisor, Kisha Supernant, through the Institute of Prairie and Indigenous Archaeology.

Supernant had been receiving calls for years from Indigenous communities wanting to identify unmarked graves through non-destructive means at residential school sites. She wanted to further Wadsworth’s skills and sent him to Austria for three months to learn to use constantly evolving multi-channel technologies, including ground penetrating radar and magnetic gradiometry, two techniques frequently employed in finding archaeological features and unmarked graves. 

In Europe, Liam worked with researchers, who were pulling these geophysical technologies behind ATVs to survey massive landscapes like Stonehenge, while producing very high resolution images. Areas that were surveyed in just a day and a half with these new techniques would have taken many weeks in the past. While these technologies have been around for decades, they are constantly evolving to become faster, and more efficient with higher resolution imagery. 

With $1.3 million dollars of support from a CFI-JELF, Supernant and Wadsworth co-designed Community-Engaged Indigenous Archaeo-geophysics and Remote SENSING (CIARS) Lab to aid in community-engaged work to detect unmarked graves at residential schools and other culturally significant sites. 

“The work centres the goals of Indigenous communities around reclaiming ancestral lands, stories, and belongings,” says Supernant. “Liam’s community-driven work is part of the transformation of archaeology from being extractive to being supportive and restorative.”

Community-driven archaeology requires that communities themselves can be directly involved in the work itself, which led to the development of an Indigenous Archaeology micro-course, a collaboration between Wadsworth, Supernant, another archaeologist named Ave Dersch, and the Chipewyan Prairie First Nation. Through the course, Indigenous community members learned archaeological techniques that ensure the preservation and elevation of history as it truly happened. 

“The academy is a very privileged place to be, and the people who have traditionally gotten into the academy are [often] from a similar type of background,” says Wadsworth. “The story is not as clear as it is presented to be, and I’ve always wanted to amplify diverse perspectives.” 

Wadsworth is now leaving the U of A to begin his post-doc at the University of B.C in Vancouver. He wants to continue doing community-driven work while focusing on the impact archeology has on modern people.