Scattered

Sgt. Paolo Magliocco is a sergeant with the Lethbridge Police Service. Over his 14–15-year policing career, he has worked in financial crime, major crimes, violent crime, and frontline patrol. In addition to his operational role, he is trained in the Edmonton Police Service’s Reintegration Program, a peer-supported wellness initiative designed to help first responders process traumatic incidents and remain healthy throughout their careers.

In this episode we talk about:

Notes from the start

An update because it’s been a while.

The dispersal article (part 2 of 2) has been accepted! Yay! You can find it here: https://yvonnekjorlien.com/scavenging-study/ and here: https://authors.elsevier.com/sd/article/S2589-871X(25)00078-6

The Scavenging Study has been expanding east and west in Canada.

I was at Calgary Expo 2026 after returning from a not-Jordan trip (the trip was “re-routed” thanks to disruption in the Middle East). The not-Jordan trip prompted a bit of reflection, while Expo was an amazing experience and I’m looking forward to being a vendor again next year.

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Transcript

Yvonne: I’m going to get you to introduce yourself and say where you are and what you do.

Paolo: Perfect. So I’m Sergeant Paolo Magliocco. I’m with the Lethbridge Police Service.

I’m currently assigned to our patrol division. We call it the field operations division, but nobody knows what that means. It is patrol operations, so frontline emergency response.

Yvonne: Emergency response. Oh, so you probably see some really good stuff.

Paolo: Yeah, absolutely. It’s a busy, action-packed world for sure, but it’s also not. Like we deal with a lot of general calls for service as well.

Just assisting the public wherever we can, depending on the issues that they’re having or that they’re facing. We also do general investigation work. So anything that’s not necessarily classified as major, let’s say, something that’s perhaps more simplistic, patrol operations will deal with those investigations as well.

Yvonne: All right. And so this was quite a change from your previous role when we met.

Paolo: Yes, exactly. I come from the major crime world. I’ve worked in a couple different areas, but I used to work in financial crime.

I did that for about five years. I really enjoyed that type of work as well. And then I shifted into violent crime.

So it was quite a change. But yeah, certainly my last role with the police service was investigating major, complex or sensitive type major crime. And that’s everything from homicides to major sexual assaults, robberies, major assaults, stabbings, those types of things, or anything really that’s complex or sensitive for the police service.

And that could be things that involves, for example, some type of political influence or something that might otherwise be challenging for a frontline police officer to deal with.

Yvonne: And so how did you… Did you always want to be a police officer?

Paolo: Yeah, actually, I did. It was easy for me, I think. To join the police service. It was just something that I always wanted to do. It was my only… That was my only sort of career path and career choice in life. And I was lucky because my family and my parents were always so very supportive of that. And everything I did was to gear myself up for a role in a life in police work. Went to school for it.

You know, everything I did, sort of decisions that I made as a young person was always geared towards ultimately becoming a police officer and working in that role. And once I became a police officer, I wanted to work in investigations. That was sort of the first thing that interests me.

And that was where I wanted to go with my career. So very fortunate. You know, I’ve been very fortunate to sort of get into that. And move into that relatively quickly in my career as well.

Yvonne: So what is it about investigations that appealed to you? Is it the mystery? Is it the puzzle? Is it working with people?

Paolo: Yeah, I think ultimately, I would say it’d be the challenge of that work. Because it’s so… It’s sort of all-encompassing and it’s very…

And there’s some significant depth to it. I just felt like, you know, you can really truly impact the community when you’re investigating these types of major occurrences. Because there’s big community concern around these sort of major events, right?

That happen and that garner a lot of, let’s say, news media or attention through media. But yeah, it’s just an area that I’ve just valued and appreciated a lot. And found that that’s sort of my niche.

And I think a lot of police officers, ultimately, they try to find an area that they’re good at, you know? And that speaks to them. And a lot of police officers, I think, pick that early on in their careers.

You know, they see that there’s so many different areas that you can go into. And that you can specialize in. But for me, it was investigations, for sure.

Yvonne: And it was quite a leap, I imagine, from financial investigations to death investigations.

Paolo: Yes.

Yvonne: I don’t know if it’s the same jump that you’re feeling now, from death investigations to frontline. But it sounds like you’ve had a few massive jumps in the past few years.

Paolo: Yeah, absolutely. It’s all very different, right? And these are, of course, all areas that I’ve enjoyed.

I’ve enjoyed tremendously. Yeah, financial crime, for sure, it’s just a different beast, right? And thankfully, you’re not dealing with a dead person or some type of trauma-related event.

But serious nonetheless, right? And people that suffer major loss, you know, financially, of course, is very impactful. And so it’s nice to contribute in that world as well.

Yeah.

Yvonne: And so let’s talk about the stuff you did with death investigations. Because that’s where you and I met. And a colleague of mine and I were talking recently about post-traumatic stress.

And in law enforcement, it’s gone through a bit of an evolution where it was not talked about. And kind of everybody has it, just shuffling under the carpet. And it’s, from what I understand, kind of sort of not really acknowledged.

But, you know, it is what it is. To now where it’s part of the practice, part of a daily practice. But it’s not that way with people that work with you, like me and Pam, part of the forensic consulting portfolio that you all reach out to. It’s not part of our bailiwick yet. So I was wondering if you could talk a little bit about that.

And how, maybe what you’ve experienced with death investigations. Because that’s not easy. I think it takes a certain type of person.

It’s not just skill set. I think it’s a personality, temperament thing, as well as the supports.

Paolo: Yeah, exactly. It is quite interesting. So in the, I would say in the short time I’ve been in policing, which is like 14-ish years, 15 years, something like that, it has taken some pretty significant shifts in terms of wellness. And when I first started, which isn’t that long ago, realistically, I don’t think we had very good wellness programming or resourcing in place.

And that is true for the entire country. I would say for all police agencies in the country at that time.

The expectation was, you come in as a resilient person. You’re picked, through a very robust and competitive process, to become a police officer in the first place. And I think that that was kind of the reliance at the time. You’re resilient, you’re strong, you’re mentally well, you’re physically well. And now here’s a difficult job for you to do. And the expectation is that you will deal with trauma and you’re going to deal with death investigations. And you’re going to deal with sort of destruction in the community and a lot of negativity. And you’re just going to do it. And you’re going to be quiet about it, so to speak. If there are inherent issues, well, that’s something for you to deal with in retirement. It’s not something that you bring to light while you’re working. Which of course, that in itself goes very much against human nature and behavior.

Because, as we all know, police officers are just people. And we’re all susceptible to the same issues and the same effects as any other person. But there we are with that old debate.

You know, police officers are expected to be perfect. And we’re expected to do a perfect job. However, we are just imperfect people.

And so what I value so much, certainly about Lethbridge Police Service, but about policing now in general, is that it’s shifted. And we have a new approach to this because there is so much history where police officers have become unwell because of the job. Police officers, you know, ultimately you can become sick if you’re not careful.

And so that sort of manifests in many different ways. Mentally unwell, we can develop mental illnesses and we can develop what’s known as PTSD. And we’re actually more susceptible to those mental illnesses than the general population.

And so the shift has been: how do we tackle that? Right. And how can we keep police officers at work longer and keep them at work safer and more well?

And so this shift has been, we have to create some wellness programming and we have to create avenues to make sure that we’re safe at work, safe from mental illness. Right.

And so we have psychologists now that we work with and we’re able to access care and we’re able to access counselling that seemingly with no stigma associated to it, which is actually fantastic.

Yvonne: So is it talked about much more? I’ve got this vision where, 20 years ago, you go out with a beer with your colleagues and you’re talking about your day and everybody talks about the file or the case, but nobody talks about how they feel about the case.

Paolo: Yeah. And I think that that happens still.

Yvonne: Okay.

Paolo: But now it’s just more talked about from a wellness perspective. Like, today police officers will openly discuss seeing a psychologist and openly discuss the challenges that they’re facing or how a particular, you know, certainly a particular death has impacted their mental wellbeing. Right. Which is really cool. I really appreciate that with my colleagues as well, having those sort of tough conversations. But whereas you’re, I think you’re correct.

Before we’d have some drinks or we would connect as a group after shift or after work and just talk about how, “well, that was really terrible.” “That was a really bad call for service,”
or “that was a really bad investigation.” And then we would leave it at that and then sort of move on to the next thing.

I think there’s some benefit in that, right? Because connecting with our peers is really important for police officers. And police work is so unique, right? And only police officers kind of understand other police officers, I would say. And so that peer connection is really cool.

It does help and it kind of drives you through some of those difficult times. We’ve kind of globbed onto that idea as well. And we’ve created like a peer support network as well.

So, peer support is now an actual program. It’s actually something more official where particularly trained police officers can actually connect with you, if you’ve dealt with something challenging, and just provide that outlet for you where it doesn’t have to be like an unofficial conversation in a bar over a beer, right?

It can be something more robust now, which is also really cool.

Yvonne: I kind of got this vision in my head of maybe more of a formal debrief. Yeah. Like talking about, let’s say, I don’t know, a domestic violence call.

You go out and, there’s a body on scene. It’s not pretty. There’s a lot of blood. There’s been a lot of violence. And the perpetrator is still on scene. And they’re still very much in the moment, very emotional. And now you are stepping into this highly charged environment.

Paolo: Yes.

Yvonne: That’s insane to walk into. Just for a normal person, to walk into a situation like that and then to try to resolve what you can or make some sense of order out of it. And then you go home to a normal life.

Paolo: Right.

Yvonne: Since you need a transition period in there, some sort of debrief. And that now with the psychologists, or even the peer group, there may be more of that.

Paolo: Yes, exactly. And I think you sort of, you hit the nail on the head beautifully there. Most people, if you think of it, that’s not normal. And that’s not something that the human brain can realistically just sort of deal with on its own. And so creating peer support and creating these outlets through a robust counseling program.

We’ve also developed something that’s really interesting for police, it’s reintegration. And this is a program actually developed by the Edmonton Police Service. They’re sort of the gold standard program across the country that a lot of different police agencies, as well as, fire and ambulance services, paramedic services have also implemented.

But it’s about how do we deal with the trauma from one particular call, let’s say, or one particular situation. And it’s all about exposure therapy and sort of the ideas behind exposure therapy and how that might help us help us process something that’s occurred. And so now we can sort of recreate the incident or… let’s say the death or something like that. And basically, you get to walk back through it and you expose yourself to it again in a safe environment with peers and with psychologists. The design is to help you process what’s occurred in a safe environment. And so we can recreate those situations now and you just kind of go through it kind of piecemeal, piece after piece. And, you sort of get to sit in the feelings that you have and you get to sit in sort of the reaction that your body might have to those certain things or triggers, for example, and then get to a place where you’re comfortable again.

You know, it’s interesting, but, for example, if you deal with something traumatic. Let’s say there’s a fatality collision that police officers deal with and involves a particular type of vehicle. And from that point on, you might see that particular type of vehicle throughout the city or the community that you live, and it causes an effect on you. It creates a stress or it creates some kind of response. So now we can say, OK, that’s that appears to be a problem. So let’s work on that now. And so you can get exposed, for example, to that type of vehicle over and over and over again in a safe place, in a safe environment to the point where it no longer affects you anymore. And then you can sort of move forward with that. Right.

So it’s pretty cool. It’s a pretty cool program. We’ve had tremendous success with this program. It’s in the infancy as well. It’s pretty new. It’s only the last few years within our service. Edmonton Police has been doing it for many, many years now, but the success is huge. And it’s about resolving the trauma for the police officer, keeping the police officer at work, keeping them healthy, happy at work, and then preventing the bigger issue of police officers on sick leave. Right.

Which impacts all of us. That impacts the organization, that impacts the community, you know, creates those vacancies that we don’t want, that nobody wants.

And so it’s seemingly a really good answer to that.

Yvonne: So what about the expectations? Because the support seemed to have changed so that… I guess what I’m getting at when you mentioned being in this exposure type therapy environment for the reintegration and whether it’s you’re  allowing whatever you’re feeling to come up and to kind of process that. Oftentimes–and I know this from personal experience–that it isn’t just about what you’re thinking.You can have a visceral reaction and it doesn’t have to be about anything that you’re thinking. You think that you’re fine, but your body is doing this weird shit.

Paolo: Yes.

Yvonne: And you’re like, what the hell is going on? Why is my eye twitching all of a sudden? And it won’t stop. Why are my shoulders up around my ears and I can’t get them to relax? And it all started after this one incident. And so I was just wondering about how the expectation for individuals–individual police officers–to recognize these changes and to see that “I’m not expecting myself to be perfect.” “I’m not expecting myself to resolve this within the next day”, that “I’m OK for me to be affected.” And to do something about it.

Paolo: Yeah, absolutely. There is certainly some onus placed on the individual police officer to kind of say, hey, this is affecting me. Hey, this is bothering me as well as on police leadership. Certainly to also recognize if there’s somebody in their charge that might be experiencing some things or maybe they’ve got a reaction to something serious that’s happening around them. But it’s funny because I think sometimes we also don’t know or don’t recognize yet that there’s a problem.

Yvonne: Yeah.

Paolo: And I’ll give you an interesting example. So when I when I became trained in reintegration, it was myself and two other colleagues within the police service that went to the Edmonton Police Service to get this reintegration training so that we could sort of implement it at the police service. And when I went to this training, so they asked me, did I have an example of a time when something happened to me that I could [share] they could attempt reintegration with me on. And so I thought, yeah, you know what? Here’s an interesting case that happened to me.

A colleague in mind–this is when I was in in patrols. I want to say it might have been the first time I was in patrols or the second time I was in patrols–but I went to a call. It was actually a traffic complaint in a quiet residential neighborhood, and there was a report of a vehicle that was kind of driving around the neighborhood and wasn’t driving appropriately. And so myself and a colleague went down there and through our investigation, we actually determined that it was related to a domestic violence incident that happened at a house in this neighborhood.

And so we located the victim and she told us she was a victim of domestic violence and it was her husband at the time. And he was acting irrationally since that time and was driving around the neighborhood and he was having some problems. So we ended up locating him at his house and he needed to be arrested.

So we went up to the door and tried to speak with him. He barricaded himself in the house and he wouldn’t come outside. And a short while later, he actually started cooking off fireworks at us. And if you know fireworks, they sound an awful lot like gunshots. Right. And so we were unsure what was happening. Were we being shot at or what was going on? And so these little firework rounds were kind of whizzing by our heads. And so we had to kind of duck and dive and get some more help down there to help us through the situation.

We ended up resolving it after kind of a brief standoff. But I didn’t quite realize that was actually pretty impactful on me. And so I went through this reintegration with the Edmonton Police Service and we went down to their shooting range and they recreated that for me.

And they were able to shoot off something that resembled fireworks. It was kind of like a less lethal round that they could use that sort of sounded a lot like a firework. And the reintegration officer that I was working with noticed right away when that was happening, he noticed the things that you mentioned, like, kind of the hair on my neck started to stand up. And I was getting goosebumps and I would stiffen and it was having an obvious impact and effect on me. And I thought that was really interesting because I didn’t know at the time that it was actually kind of impactful and that my body was having a response to that noise. And it was bringing me right back to that moment where I thought, oh, I’m in trouble. I’m getting shot at. Thankfully, it was just fireworks. But again, it was very eye opening.

And so I would think other police officers probably would be in the same boat where they may not know until they’re faced with something similar again, right?

Yvonne: I’m just going to throw this out there, but I’m guessing that you probably brought that example up because somewhere in your body or your mind, you knew that it was still niggeling at you.

Paolo: Yeah, exactly. And, I’m fortunate that I haven’t actually been shot at yet as a police officer. But I know that there are police officers in Canada where this is a reality for them.

But yeah, it was at the time one of the more significant incidents for me in terms of my own personal safety and kind of the feeling of my own safety in jeopardy. Right. And so, yeah, very interesting, though. Very interesting.

Yvonne: Holy crap. I can only imagine. I mean, we’re still stampede is just about to finish. So I’ve got to put up with fireworks every night at 11.

Paolo: Yeah, right.

Yvonne: I’ve got a cat. And so at 11 o’clock every night, I’m sitting straight up in bed. My cat’s going, what the hell is going on? Every year.

Paolo: Yeah, same thing, right? Same thing. And there you go. And there’s people affected by that, Yvonne.

Yvonne: I know. But you’re right. They sound a lot like gunshots because I’ve heard both. And I’m like, I can’t tell the difference.

Paolo: Yeah, exactly. Especially close up. You don’t know exactly what you got going on.

Yvonne: So well, especially when you’re walking into that situation where you’ve just talked to the woman and she says she’s the victim of domestic violence and the husband who’s obviously driving off his rage, and you’re walking into a potentially highly-charged situation. Yeah, he could have had a gun. So you’re expecting this.

Paolo: Yes, absolutely. And we know, unfortunately, domestic violence, there’s a huge risk for injury and death involved, right? Because of the emotional components to that. And that’s a reality in this country. Unfortunately, domestic violence, it affects everybody, right? It affects all kinds of families. It doesn’t matter where they come from. They’re all sort of equally affected by it. And so we know this in advance, right? So as soon as it’s domestic violence related, we think, OK, there’s a big, big, big risk here. And so you never know what how people are going to act or what’s going to happen, right? So, yeah, it can be quite impactful and challenging for police, for sure.

Yvonne: So since you got trained in this integration model, you’ve seen the effect that it’s had in your own life. So I’m guessing you’ve probably also seen the effect it’s had in your colleagues’ lives.

Paolo: Yes, absolutely, and I’m so thankful that I’ve seen tremendous success with colleagues that have gone through this program and how it can be very, very life changing for them, for the positive, right? Because before, they would just be required to sit in it and deal with it themselves, whereas now we actually have this step-by-step process that we can use to help reduce the impact that it’s having on them.

And, you know, Lethbridge is not alone in this, but we do have police officers that have gone through reintegration and they are still at work. They’re okay, they’re able to function and do the job, despite major trauma that’s occurred, and so it’s really neat. And oftentimes, police officers that are successful in the program become sort of a cheerleader for the program, and they encourage other police officers that are maybe more hesitant to use it to kind of step up and say, you should try it, it will work, it’s good, it’s good stuff.

Yvonne: So, what have you learned about coping with your own stuff? I guess, either from working through your own stuff in the reintegration program, but also seeing others go through it. What are some of the lessons that you’re taking and applying on yourself?

Paolo: I think the biggest lesson is just realizing that you the things that we do are not normal. And that if you want to have a healthy career, and stay in police work, and do the job you love, that you’re going to have to seek help when it’s right. And you’re going to have to kind of do the things that you that you need to do to stay healthy.

Interestingly enough, this idea of mental illness and resiliency and officer wellness, you’re at the greatest risk within the first few years of your career. That’s the greatest risk for you. Because your mind is so flexible, and it’s easily susceptible, I think, to damage from trauma and death and destruction. You need to build resiliency, and you need to build appropriate outlets to kind of survive, right.

And, that would be something that I would tell new police officers or sort of relate this to new police officers within our service that you have to be most cautious in the early stages of your career. The older police officers that we always accuse of being a little bit crusty, or rough around the edges, those are the ones that are probably more resilient, because they’ve got a lot of lessons. And they’ve got time in that they’ve learned some things.

And so I think the big, the big life lesson is just do it early. Start early, you know, just recognize that it’s okay. And this is what we need to do right from the get go. And then, as years go by, and you may access these programs less, because you may feel or find that you’re, you’re better equipped to deal with it.

Yvonne: Or maybe you found other ways.

Paolo: Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. Like family supports and friend supports. That’s really important too, right. And it doesn’t have to always be related to work related programming. I find that I rely on friends and family, more often as well.

It’s nice having outside outsiders, so to speak, that you can kind of discuss things with and, and they can give you good perspectives, right? Because police officers are so unique, and we’re very different, we’re a different breed of people. And so sometimes you can get lost in cultural things within policing.

So it’s nice to have a robust network outside of policing, to stay in contact with so that you don’t lose focus too much. And, and you can lean in to support from friends and family, for sure.

Yvonne: Do you notice a difference in the type of recruit that are coming in now, versus when you started? I guess, kind of related to that too, is if your graduating class, or the people that you started with, are they still around? How were they different than the recruits that are being hired now?

Paolo: Great question, actually. I’ve thought of this a lot recently, because things have changed a lot with how we sort of recruit and retain people. So I would say yes, the vast majority of people that I started with, they are still police officers today, which is really great.

I think the recruiting process typically is that you become a police officer, because you are answering a calling in life, versus just being hired for a job. Policing is not just a job, it’s definitely a way of life. And I think our recruiting efforts have always been, let’s pick people that are answering a calling in life that are committed to this work.

And oftentimes, those are the people that stay for an entire career, but we’ve seen some things change and some things shift in society, we’ve gone through some pretty big things as a society, like the COVID pandemic, as an example. We’ve seen big displays of, or big debates surrounding things like the killing of George Floyd in the United States, sort of a movement of anti militarization of police, for example.

We’ve seen things like, not to get too much in the weeds, but, sometimes the media isn’t always the best reviewer of police.

Yvonne: Really, I would not have figured that.

Paolo: We’ve kind of run into a place where not everybody wants to be a police officer anymore. And our recruiting pool is actually really small now. And this is this is true right across our country.

Every police agency in the country, I think has had similar challenges in recruiting. And so, we’re hoping that there will be a shift again, where everyday people will want to become police officers, despite the inherent challenges, despite the realness of the job. And how it’s so challenging, because police officers have to deal with things that are just negative, and people are at their worst. And, we have to come in and kind of make some sense of that, and try to make it safe and good for everyone. But sometimes it’s a lose-lose, no matter what. So I think police leadership has done well in the last five years to try to build back a little bit from some of these big key challenges that agencies have faced, and trying to really keep people at work.

Let’s keep senior police officers at work. And let’s try to recruit some new people that really want to do this job.

Yvonne: But I’m guessing there is an additional advantage to keeping you all around as well. I mean, it’s not just it’s not just that it’s cheaper, because it’s expensive to hire new people and to train them.

Paolo: Yeah, right.

Yvonne: But you’re, I mean, the longer you stay in any job or career, the more knowledge you gain about that. And I’m guessing that in law enforcement, it’s especially important, because it’s not just knowledge of the law or whatever, but it’s also people knowledge. And that can be just about infinite, like every everybody’s a case study, everybody’s an individual.

And the more knowledge you can gain about that, the better you’d be able to respond to a situation.

Paolo: Yeah, of course. I think, it’s funny, policing is well known to be like a slow reacting force as society changes around us and community expectation changes around us. Sometimes the police aren’t always as quick to change.

But I think we’re getting a little bit better at that. And I think community expectations change so frequent when it comes to policing, we just need to be better at being more adaptable. And I think if we come into some kind of groove, where communities shift, society expectations shift, and we kind of shift with it, it kind of tends to result in more happiness all around happier police officers, happier community members, they’re more satisfied, they’re feeling more trust with police as well, which is a big issue.

But that comes down to our training. And in that Canadian police officers are so unique in the world because our training is second to none, truly. And when you when you put a Canadian police officer up against, for example, an American police officer, which tends to be the best example, we can always say our hiring recruiting standards are far more robust.

Our training standards are far more robust. We have much stricter transparency rules and, oversight and accountability on Canadian police officers. And this is what makes Canadian police unique.

And this is what makes us better, comparatively to others around the world. And I think it also allows us to be more flexible when we need to be. But yes, it does fall on our training standards. Absolutely.

Yvonne: So I’m going to completely shift directions, because I want to work with you again. So I want to know when you’re going to be back doing death investigations.

Paolo: Well, maybe if I’m lucky, I don’t have to do another death investigation again.

Yvonne: Oh, man. So what other things that maybe we haven’t touched on that you want to talk about? Something that we missed?

Paolo: We should mention a little bit about kind of our own relationship and how that might work. Because I feel like it’s a little bit unique. Like I mentioned, police are just inherently difficult to kind of adapt and be flexible sometimes, when it especially when comes to our investigations.

But recently, I would say that we have really started to lean in more on experts and civilian experts. And that’s been, I believe it’s been very transformative for us. And so when we rely on archaeologists, anthropologists, for example, to sort of assist us, I think it’s been game changing.

Because there are just things that we just don’t know. And so I think relying on academic knowledge has been very helpful. There’s countless examples, I think that, over the years where we’ve had to really rely on academics like yourself, Yvonne, to sort of help us navigate sort of these very challenging death investigations, where we may not know how to proceed, or we may not know what else we can do, sort of from our typical investigative work, what are some things that we can do differently. And I think we’ve been able to learn some lessons over the years. And I think, relying on expertise in which we do locally with the University of Alberta, and of course, yourself, Yvonne, to kind of help us with, with those types of investigations.

And, we’ve always been good at relying on, we have analysts, for example, civilian analysts that we work with. And these people are just second to none. They’re well trained, they’re well educated, they can help police investigators make linkages and which can ultimately help us solve crime.

But we’ve never been good at sort of reaching outside the organization and say, we might need an anthropologist to help us. We might need an archaeologist to help us with a more challenging case.

Yvonne: What was, why? Sorry to interrupt, but why? Because that’s a big shift.

That’s a big change in approach. I mean, there’s a lot of ego. And there’s also, I’m guessing, probably confidentiality and privacy concerns involved as well.

So that’s a big jump to make.

Paolo: It is a big jump. I think you said it right when you said sometimes ego gets in the way. You know, police investigators like to, I think they like to say that they know, and they’ll figure it out. And we’ve got all the help we need internally with police officers only to help. But we know that’s really not the case anymore. Some of the best investigations are often solved using science.

And we know this because of DNA evidence, for example. The new thing, DNA. It hasn’t been, it’s not that new, but it’s like 30 years, 30 plus years old now.

Yvonne: It’s pretty new.

Paolo: Exactly. And so that was game changing for us. You know, we’re really relying on DNA and how that can help us.

And I think it’s the same. And now that I’ve specifically worked with you, as an anthropologist, it’s like really interesting that we can say, oh, wow, like there are things that we just don’t know. And we don’t understand.

And we might need help in that area. And so to kind of lean into that is, I think, pretty huge, right? There’s some, of course, there’s challenges, right?

And there’s always cost challenges, for example, perhaps the government doesn’t want to spend the money on it. You know, where we must be fiscal hawks. But the other side of it is, we also need to solve crimes.

So, relying on the experts that we’re aware of, I think is really valuable.

Yvonne: Yeah, I think that was part of the argument with the Manitoba landfill case. You know, the public and the families had this big outcry, they wanted to investigate the landfill, but then the government was very concerned about the financial output.

Paolo: Yes.

Yvonne: And how much it would cost. And, then there were other concerns too, that, those of us who’ve worked in those types of situations, well, what about health and safety, the actual workers, and not just the health and safety, but the wellness, because you know what, 25 years after working on the Pickton investigation, I’m still feeling stuff. Yeah.

So, you know, there’s just a lot going on, I think. It’s not just the financial stuff.

Paolo: Yeah, absolutely. And financial things will always be a factor, especially, as it comes to government work and police, as you know, we’re just arms of the government. And, it’s the people’s money that we are spending to investigate crime.

But again, we want to set ourselves up for success. And so, that case out of Manitoba is a really great example of that. You know, I think ultimately, would there be success if it was just police alone doing that type of work? Or would it actually be successful if we are leaning in on our scientific partners and experts to help navigate that? And I think that is just the way it is, right? And you bring up the point too, with the Pickton case as well, heavily relied on science for that as well, right?

And like yourself working in the field there, the success, I think, comes from that true partnership, right? It’s police and science together that I think can make that successful.

Yvonne: Yeah, yeah. I think you’ve got to know your limits. But you’re right, there’s a lot of ego involved.

Paolo: Yeah, exactly. And that, absolutely. And that’s the thing with police, our subculture, right?

And, we inherently don’t trust. And that’s some of the challenges that we have as police officers. But again, when we partner with people that have shown us their value and their worth, it just makes sense.

And you do have to pick, I think, with that, you do have to pick the right people, the right scientists, for example, the right civilian expert. Otherwise, it doesn’t work. If they don’t understand sort of police culture or police investigations, or if they don’t understand sort of legal limitations, either.

That’s a big one as well. But if there is that understanding, and that relationship exists, then we need to use it.

Yvonne: I don’t know, I think, because law enforcement sees, I guess, all the negativity, the underbelly of humanity, and everything wrong with humanity. It’s easy to develop a healthy distrust of people. I think it’s only natural.

Paolo: Yeah, that’s right. Would you believe people lie to us, Yvonne? No, no.

Really makes us jaded.

Yvonne: So yeah, I can see where there’s a bit of distrust in working outside law enforcement.

Paolo: Exactly, right?

Yvonne: It’s a tough situation to be in, broadening that circle to move forward the greater good. But you’re steeped in this, I don’t know, you’re in an abusive relationship, and yet you’re trying to broaden out your friendship circle. Who do you trust?

I don’t know. I don’t even know how to trust.

Paolo: Yeah, exactly. Yeah, big issue.

Yvonne: So yeah, as you can see, we solve all of life’s issues on this podcast.

Paolo: Yes, we do.

Yvonne: Yes.

Paolo: I love it.

Yvonne: Welcome to the fold.

Paolo: That’s right, yeah. It’s such an honor to be part of it.

Yvonne: Okay, is there anything else that you want to bring up? Where are you going to be, I don’t know, in 10 years? Where do you see yourself?

Are you going to be retired on some Italian beach somewhere?

Paolo: Yeah. Perfect world. Yeah.

Retirement on a beach somewhere would be really nice. Yeah. We’ll see.

We’ll see what the next decade brings. Certainly, I have more time to spend in policing, and so we’ll see where that goes and what the adventures will be. I’m not sure, but I’m definitely happy for now in the role that I’m in and thankful that I’m in it.

And despite some of the challenges, I think that I enjoy the work, and it’s meaningful and impactful, and I see the value in it in those little moments that we have with community members that aren’t… it’s not always the high-profile stuff that you see on the news, right? I think that’s the stuff that police officers are doing every day behind the scenes that nobody knows about. I feel the best in those situations because that’s what really helps people, I believe.

So it’s good. It’s fun, and I do like that. But yes, 10 years, from now, retirement would be really nice. Whether I love the job or not, I still want to retire.

Yvonne: Are you going to continue with the Peer Support Reintegration group? Yes. Yeah?

Paolo: Yeah, absolutely. It’s good. I find that that’s one of the best ways to give back to my colleagues as well, and kind of be there if they need that help or want it, right?

But it is great, and I also value officially being a leader in the organization, and I can have a lot of impact in that role as well. And it’s something that I really, really pay close attention to, because some leaders are bad, and I don’t want to be a bad one. So I want to make sure that my impact is, the colleagues that I have around me, is always positive, and want to be that good coach or mentor for them, and hope that they’re being developed the right way, and looked after as well.

That’s all very important to me. So I think that’s also been very nice to have that opportunity.

Yvonne: So since you’ve had all this mentorship experience, and this reintegration experience, if you could go back to Paolo as a recruit, what would you tell him?

Paolo: Well, that’s a loaded question, Yvonne.

Yvonne: Well, welcome to the podcast.

Paolo: Yeah. You know what I would say is, as hard as it is in police organizations, just always, just always do what’s right in the moment. Don’t worry about what people think of you. Don’t worry about whether it’s kosher or not. Do what’s right. Do what’s good for you. Look after your health. Look after your mental health, especially. Because 25 years is a long time to spend as a police officer. So if you can do what’s right early on, I think it just sets you up for success long term. Nice.

Yvonne: Yeah, I like it. That’s some serious advice.

Paolo: Right. Now, if anybody takes it or listens to it, that’ll be another thing.

Yvonne: Yeah. And if you would have taken it 15 years ago, who knows?

Paolo: Yeah, exactly.

Yvonne: Probably just would have given you the hand and walked off.

Paolo: Yeah, right. Exactly.

Yvonne: Well, this has been an absolute pleasure. I am so glad I got you on the podcast, Paolo.

Paolo: I’m so thankful that you invited me. It’s been great connecting with you again and chatting with you. I really appreciate that.

Transcribed by TurboScribe and Google

An update, because it’s been a while. And it’s been busy.

The dispersal article (part 2 of 2) has been resubmitted. Once it’s been accepted, it’ll be posted on https://yvonnekjorlien.com/scavenging-study/

My new book, The Main Gate: an Elise Marquette adventure, is now out. Get the print and ebook now through my website and through: https://buy.bookfunnel.com/8cl1pai3g6

Audiobook is in progress.

I’ll release the book everywhere except Amazon in July, then on Amazon in fall 2025. If you’re an Amazon-junkie, look for a pre-order opportunity in the summer.

***

Thank you to every single guest on this podcast. Your insights and knowledge are extremely valuable, and I am very grateful and humbled that you chose to be on this show.

The podcast will remain available to new listeners or for your re-listening pleasure.

Patreon will remain open, as I’ll continue to post tidbits and exclusives about books and behind the scenes about any new research opportunities.

Become a Patreon member and get the next episode before everyone else: https://www.patreon.com/c/YvonneKjorlien

Do you have a suggestion for a topic on the Scattered podcast? Do you have a question about working with human remains? Do you have a search story to share? Email at [email protected] or contact me through the contact form on my website: yvonnekjorlien.com.

Support the podcast and my research through:

Your contributions will go toward my research, webhosting, and my time.

Jessica Auchter is a full professor and research chair in visual culture in international studies at Université Laval in Quebec City, Quebec, Canada. She explores the management of dead bodies after mass violence and how institutions grapple with this challenge. 

In this episode we talk about:

Find more about Jessica Auchter through her websites:

and the following:

Notes from the start

Clea Koff’s 2004 book The Bone Woman: Among the Dead in Rwanda, Bosnia, Croatia and Kosovo.

Do you want to be the first to hear a Scattered episode? Become a Patreon member and get the next episode before everyone else: https://www.patreon.com/c/YvonneKjorlien

Do you have a suggestion for a topic on the Scattered podcast? Do you have a question about working with human remains? Do you have a search story to share? Email at [email protected] or contact me through the contact form on my website: yvonnekjorlien.com.

Support the podcast and my research through:

Your contributions will go toward my research, webhosting, and my time. Want to find out more about my research?

Check out the Scavenging Study: https://yvonnekjorlien.com/scavenging-study/.

Transcript

Yvonne Kjorlien: All right, thank you very much for responding to my email, number one. And talking about dead people is always a conversation-ender. And here we’re actually going to have a conversation about dead people. Yay. So, Jessica, please introduce yourself and tell us where you are and what you do.

Jessica Auchter: Thank you so much. So I’m Jessica Auchter. I’m a full professor and research chair in visual culture in international studies at Universite Laval in Quebec City, Canada. so before that I worked at the University of Tennessee Chattanooga for 10 years before moving up to Quebec. So my background is mostly in international studies. My degree is in global politics. But for a long time, I’ve been working with issues of memory, memorialization and its representation and the larger kind of dynamics of the politics of violence and how we think about the aftermath of violence, its effects and those sorts of dynamics. So, I have a wide-ranging interest in those kinds of issues that ultimately led me to this focus on dead bodies, which as you said, is often more of a conversation ender than a conversation starter. So, I’m really excited to get the chance to talk about it at length today.

Yvonne Kjorlien: That is quite a change. I mean, not just from Tennessee to Quebec, but also from what you were studying to now. How are you dealing with, I mean, I guess both culture shifts?

Jessica Auchter: Yeah, it’s interesting. So, the move up here was sort of a natural move because I’ve been working for a long time in the dynamics of kind of visual representation. And so, when the position opened up where I am now for an opportunity to work directly with the kind of dynamics of visual representations of violence and human rights violations, it was kind of a no-brainer to make the move.

But I think for a long time I’ve been interested in the dynamics of violence. Originally it started with an interest in genocide and the aftermath of genocide and the larger politics of memory. But I think over time what I started to realize is that many people who were interested in these kinds of issues were focused a lot on the institutional dynamics of reconciliation after atrocity, after genocide. So it was a lot about peace processes, political reconciliation, institutional mechanisms of justice, but that in many of these instances you were dealing with a very material aftermath of dead bodies. So after genocide, yes, you do have all these issues of political reconciliation and institutional dynamics and rebuilding of state structures and governments, but you also have a lot of dead bodies that are sort of scattered around on the ground. And there is the kind of problem of: How do you deal with them? How do you bury them according to local traditions? How are these understandings contested? What are the involvement of international actors in the kind of dynamics of the materiality of dead bodies after atrocity?

And it started with the genocide context but kind of broadened over time. But also how do you reckon with some of the dilemmas associated with these dead bodies who are often articulated in the context of truth narratives. So I think it started with an interest in violence and its aftermath. But I started to realize that for a lot of people, their immediate experience of political violence had a lot more to do with the materiality of dead bodies or the loss of loved ones and some of these narratives than the kind of attention that academics were paying to these kind of larger scale political and social reconciliation processes.

So that’s where it began is with this interest in kind of bottom up, I’ll say, dynamics of the materiality of dead bodies and just the reality that this is often a management problem. You just have a lot of dead bodies. Sometimes they’re in mass graves, sometimes we don’t know what happened to them, sometimes they’re disappeared. And so at the beginning it was a lot about the way this was framed as a management problem and also the connection between dead bodies and their integration into memorial sites, like memorial museums and that sort of thing. 

And then over time I started to think a lot more about how the reality of modern conflict, warfare, human rights violations was that we don’t see the kind of whole body in the way that is often kind of idealized. You’re not just excavating a mass grave and uncovering an entire person, identifying that person, returning them to their loved ones. That isn’t really– and then being able to kind of describe a narrative of what happened to them. That’s not really how it works. You have suicide bombings where body parts are integrated in urban sort of spaces. You have terrorist attacks like September 11th where you have bodies and body parts being combined with rubble. And then you also have governments that are deliberately trying to disaggregate bodies in order to hide what happened to them, especially in the context when governments are perpetrators of human rights violations. So I think over time my interest in dead bodies also led me more recently to this kind of interest in body parts and the questions of bodily integrity that emerge in the article that I recently wrote that was published in the Journal of Death Studies on bodily integrity.

Yvonne Kjorlien: There’s a lot there. So, just we’re going to unpack some of that. I mean, it’s all fabulous, but yeah, let’s start to unpack some of that.  So, I find it interesting that you took up the position at Laval, in this Canadian structure where we’re going through this truth and reconciliation with how Canada has treated its indigenous people and everything that’s come of that, including possible burial sites at residential schools and how we’re all coping with that, through investigations, through management, and if we leave them in the ground? Do we investigate? Do we dig them up? And even just involving indigenous community in that, how does that all look like? So, I find that very interesting that you’ve moved back to Canada during that time.

Jessica Auchter: Yeah, it is interesting. So, living in the US, there’s a big struggle with sort of engaging with some of its own of sordid history. In Canada, you see a lot more of a deliberate effort to try to sort of engage this conversation, but the conversation is still quite fraught. And there’s a lot of sort of contestation. And I think some of that comes from assumptions about what should happen that often govern our interaction with mass grave sites or with historical memory more broadly.

But I think also some of it comes from the idea that dealing with mass graves is a problem for them over there or it has become something that we think of as being associated with a post-conflict context in, for example, the developing world rather than in the developed world. Canada is the country that sends its military to engage in humanitarian missions in post-conflict.

Yvonne Kjorlien: Yeah, we don’t have that problem here. right?

Jessica Auchter: Yes. So I think that there’s this sort of disjuncture in our sense of who Canada is and then this kind of sorted historical memory that emerges at some of these sites. And so the conversation immediately begins with this fracture in the sort of sense of identity of who we are. And I think immediately from that comes this sort of desire to manage and govern that: Oh, my goodness, there’s this significant trauma. What can we do about it? And so management of trauma — and this is something that I’ve found quite extensively throughout my research trajectory –is that management of trauma is often kind of the first response, especially by government actors but often by communities as well. This trauma has emerged, now we have to manage it, because our goal is to try to end it and it has sort of ruptured up.

I think for a lot of victim communities the opposite is sort of true. That they are trying to find ways to live with that trauma or, in the Canadian case, they have already been living with the trauma that emerged out of the context of these residential schools. In some cases there was awareness of what was going on. In some cases there might not have been knowledge of the extent to which these sorts of things were happening even within the communities that were affected by it. But in a lot of cases the trauma was already a lived experience for some of these communities. And now you see this complicated set of circumstances where you have the material after effects of this atrocity that are emerging.  You have questions of what to do with it, but you have this sort of almost automatic response by a lot of actors to kind of try to manage trauma out of the public sphere and into the private sphere. And that’s often what we see for burials or reburials is that it is the burials occur as a mechanism to mobilize dead bodies out of the public sphere, where they’re not supposed to be, back into the private sphere, where they can be managed within certain communities.

There are some exceptions to this of course, but I think often that can put institutions at odds with local communities who are trying to live with that trauma or sort of sit with it, rather than overcome it or manage it. And I think it can also contribute to the sense that these stories are trying to be mobilized out of the public eye at the same time that we’re trying to reckon with the complex stories of these trauma.  So I think in a lot of my research what I found is dead bodies kind of emerge as a problem and that’s often how they’re situated. And of course when people are violently killed or killed through deprivation or sort of other sources, it is a problem, no doubt. But I think there’s a difference between thinking of this as an issue the causes of these deaths and then thinking of it as a problem that needs to be managed in terms of grave management, excavations, reburials, which is often what we see as the institutional response.

And one thing that we’re seeing a lot in the context of forensic efforts kind of worldwide is that there are tensions between local communities and international actors or national actors or these kind of systems of management because they’re not always coherent with one another and sometimes local communities have different senses. 

So I think my initial sense especially of the Canadian case but of others is always that it is up to local communities to decide kind of like what mechanisms of justice, reconciliation, and all of that, should be sort of privileged and it is the opening of the conversation rather than the closing of it that often allows for these kind of complex working-throughs of some of this trauma. So dead bodies are the initial opening into that conversation if we allow them to function in that way, or at least they can be.

Yvonne Kjorlien: I find this very interesting in that I’m seeing a kind of parallel with just death in general in North America. I’ve had conversations on this podcast and outside of it with people in the funeral industry in where, the funeral industry has sort of a hold on how we deal with death. The dead body is taken away, it’s put into a place. It’s taken care of in a coffin and you never see it again. And it’s very disconnected from the family. And if there’s any cultural tradition or family closure ceremony that they want to do, traditionally historically it wasn’t really included in the funeral industry and now they’re beginning to open it up to where the individual can, I guess, reconnect with the dead and say goodbye and do their ceremony and whatever the individual needs to do. So that management is becoming, I guess, less controlling, less encompassing. And so I just find that an interesting parallel that we’re also seeing that at a very high level institutional, like national, international governance and management level as well versus the community or sometimes even the individual.

Jessica Auchter: Yeah. Yeah. I think that for a long time we’ve made assumptions about, especially in the west, especially in North America, that certain types of management of the dead are sort of appropriate and we’ve connected those with larger narratives of who is civilized and who isn’t. So civilized countries, death is not in the public sphere. Death is in the private sphere. And even for family members of the dead, it’s often sort of mobilized out of particular spaces, like the home into the kind of funeral management kind of industry. And so it has often been seen as a marker of civilization that someone dies, they do not remain in the public sphere. They most certainly are not, for example, burned on a funeral pyre in public, and then their bodies are buried in graves and it’s fine for family members to come visit them in particular spaces. But they don’t stay in the home. There’s no period of observance where family members are with the corpse aside from potentially viewings in funeral homes which are very heavily managed, not like in the space of a home that we see in some other cultural contexts.

So I think for a long time it wasn’t just cultural differences. It was those cultural differences were perceived in a hierarchical manner from a values-laden perspective: like you’re civilized if you mobilize death outside of the public sphere. And it’s only places that are uncivilized that have these sorts of practices. So there’s a hierarchy of values attributed to how people engage with the dead. 

But I think from a global perspective and from the context of political violence, which is a context that I’m interested in from a research perspective, what one thing that we see is that there’s often an assumption made that certain parts of the world are more prone to having these sort of deaths and dead bodies publicized. It’s no surprise if there are dead bodies in the streets in Iraq, but in the US that’s an identity rupture. So there’s this kind of naturalization of death in the public sphere.

Several years ago I wrote a book chapter called Death in this Country is Normal which is drawn from a quotation by a doctor that was talking a little bit about these sort of quiet deaths from disease in the global south and the normalization of death and  how we envision which deaths count and which deaths don’t count.  But I think in many cases death has become normalized and public deaths have become normalized to the extent that political violence is assumed to be the norm in some places and then those deaths enter the public sphere. And that’s why it’s then seen as perfectly appropriate for western entities or international entities to come in and assist with that management of dead bodies, because it’s sort of necessary to re-civilize these contexts where they are so uncivilized that they have to have their death in the public sphere and they can’t manage their death on their own.

So I think there’s a kind of a larger international dynamic when it comes to political violence where two things happen.  First, death in certain places is sort of seen as normalized. And then, second, that kind of justifies international intervention in the context of death management. But one of the other effects of it is that when we do see dead bodies in the public sphere in the west, it is seen as sort of sufficiently jarring that it is not only like a wound to governance, sovereignty, management, all of these things, but it’s kind of a wound to identity. And a lot of people have suggested that September 11th sort of posed this for the United States. That you had dead bodies, body parts in the public sphere and immediately there was this huge concern as to how we manage it and this tension between the sort of national dimensions and the family members of the dead. But you have authorities in New York saying we’re going to identify every single piece of human remains that emerge out of that, which ,of course, is physically and forensically not possible.  But you see increasingly these kind of cases where bodies are combined with rubble. And I think the September 11th case is one of the ones that got me interested in this dynamic of body parts, not just dead bodies, because you have this huge challenge to resuscitating the body for burial, for family members.

And you see that also at this similar time period, suicide bombings, and that pose similar challenges, increased forms of urban warfare where you see, people being killed in environments where their bodies are more likely to combine with sort of urban rubble and that sort of thing on a global scale. So there’s kind of an interesting dynamic under which these deaths are being normalized in certain places and then they appear to us as more exceptional in the contexts that we are more familiar with or the contexts that global leaders sort of tend to reside in, like the west.

Yvonne Kjorlien: Let’s talk about that, the body parts because that’s the article that kind of got me in touch with you, in Death Studies: “Missing Pieces and Body Parts: On Bodily Integrity and Political Violence”. In it, you talk about ,I guess, the tendency for us to look at body parts as not human or the human being as less than when they are not whole, and how to make a whole human being and what do we consider whole. And I found that very interesting and since September 11th, as you mentioned, there’s  been, documentaries and articles and stories come out about, yeah, how do we navigate that? How do we reconcile our definition of what is a whole human being with what we’re finding from the rubble? And not just from a personal individual, family standpoint that very grounded in the now, but also, from insurance purposes? If somebody has lost a leg in an accident, insurance companies have costs for how much a leg is and therefore how much they should compensate the person for losing that leg. This all has, I think, a bigger scope than just the 911, but I think, as you said, it brought it really to the forefront. Let’s talk about this concept of wholeness and how body parts just does not fit into that.

Jessica Auchter: Yes. Yes. I mean, I think for a long time, I’ve been interested in human remains, dead bodies, and the aftermath of violence. And one thing that I realized is that in a lot of the conversations that were being had about this, especially in academic circles, the body was being envisioned as sort of and defined in one particular way as this sort of whole thing, human remains. It’s sort of like our traditional understandings. It’s a body inside a grave or it’s a body that should be buried inside a grave.

And that was, in a substantive way, a mismatch with a lot of what was happening in the human rights practice realm where you see for forensic efforts to resuscitate the body. but the reality of what we were dealing with is very much body parts, not whole bodies.  But the more I started to think about the goal of a lot of these forensic efforts, the more I realized that it very much was the resuscitation of the bodily whole. And the idea was we need to get all these parts and gather them together and give them to the family members. And that was being situated very heavily within narratives of justice. Sort of like what brings justice to the family, returning their loved one, but not just returning their loved one, returning their loved one whole.

And that was connected often with these sort of narratives of truthtelling. We won’t know what happened unless or until we can return the whole body of the victim to their family member. So it’s kind of like this complex intersection of these narratives of justice and truthtelling with also these narratives of sort of loved ones interactions with the bodies of their family members. And I think, as you said, it was highlighted quite significantly in the post-911 kind of context but it has been something that was being navigated in the kind of couple of decades preceding that.  You have even the sort of classic case of the Madres de Plaza de Mayo, the Argentina desaparecidos, you have this demand, and they demanded the return of their loved ones whole. There is this kind of language of wholeness situated within a lot of these demands. You have in the 1990s the sort of post-Bosnia era where you see these forensic excavations and the attempt is to kind of reaggregate body parts that have been disaggregated. I think Rwanda is also an interesting case because you don’t have the financial commitment from international partners to engage in extensive forensic excavation. But as I mentioned in the Death Studies article, even when I visited Rwanda in 2011 on a research trip, they were still undergoing excavation of mass grave sites. and they were disaggregating body parts.

And in Rwanda, the politics of reburial is quite interesting because the government has reburied dead bodies often in some cases several times as a mechanism of sort of I’ll call it grave management, which I think is kind of interesting because we often think of forensic excavation as being completely apolitical but in many cases governments are using it connected with some of these narratives of reconciliation and truthtelling.  But you have this sort of long history then of the reality on the ground being body parts, and different actors reckon with it in different ways. But one thing that I started to realize over time is that you can see a consistency that there is a desire to resuscitate the whole and that’s connected with these narratives of truthtelling and justice for family members especially, even when that may not necessarily be connected directly with what family members want.

And then also that in cases where the resuscitation of the whole body was just forensically impossible, there was this sort of discursive effort to kind of resuscitate the whole. How can we do so through narratives, through storytelling? How can we tell a story about the body part standing in a way that makes us recall this sense of wholeness?

So there was this privileging of bodily integrity and when it was materially not possible, it was done through kind of storytelling and discursive mechanisms often by governments to try to sort of resuscitate this sense of wholeness.

Yvonne Kjorlien: Can you give an example for that?

There’s been several cases where governments or entities have sort of decided that it’s practically impossible to have the whole body. So instead, they’ll set thresholds of the quantity of human remains that are needed in order to refer to something as a full body. So even as far back as World War II, when they would resuscitate sets of human remains, over time guidelines were put in place that suggested as long as you had 3 kilograms of human remains, that was labeled a whole body that could be returned to family members for burial.  Here is the body of your loved one that went away to war and died. And in that case, it wasn’t a full body, but the sort of labeling of what counts as a body in a discursive sense labeled those parts as a whole body, even though from a scientific perspective, they most certainly were not.

And the same thing in Bosnia over time. At first, they would return body parts to family members sort of as they found them and identified them. Here are the remains of your loved one. But then the family members would get a phone call six months later. We have the remains of your loved one. We’ve already received the remains of our loved one and buried them. Well, we have more. and so sometimes they would receive more and more over time. And as a result, the International Committee on Missing Persons also has a threshold in the Bosnian case.  And the threshold has shifted and changed over time and by context, but a threshold of what percentage of a body has to be there for it to be a whole body. I believe it’s 75% in the Bosnian case or it became 75% at a certain point in time.

And the same thing, September 11th, people were getting phone calls. We found the human remains of your loved one. And then they would receive another phone call. We found another part and another part and another part. And they started to consider whether or not they should wait to inform family members or wait to give over the remains until they had a certain percentage. So you have in some sense this factual scientific definition of a whole body. We were resuscitating the whole body.  We found all the body parts and then you have this kind of discursive sense of what wholeness means. And in some cases it can be parts of a body that are labeled a whole body, but in other cases it can be bodies that were not able to be found at all. Missing persons and that sort of thing. And in these kinds of cases sometimes the truthtelling mechanisms take the place of the presence of the body. We don’t have the whole body, but here’s the story of what happened. And in some cases, you see burials of empty coffins. In some cases, you see people taking parts of rubble from September 11th and burying it as if it was their family member, even though there has been no identification.  In the article, I tell a story of a suicide bombing attack where there was mingled human remains and some whole bodies that were found but no ability to identify individuals. So they started to give out sets of remains to family members. And when they ran out of whole sets of remains, they just started giving out body parts. How many family members did you lose? Okay, here’s sort of two people. And that kind of dynamic.

So I think there’s a whole host of ways in which there is kind of compensation for missing pieces or compensation for lack of bodies. And at this point you often see governments or institutions kind of step in and they tell the story that they’ve managed to resuscitate the whole but that doesn’t always map on to the reality from a forensic perspective of what has actually happened. 

So what I find interesting is that bodily integrity is our goal. Why is it so difficult for us to admit when it’s simply sort of impractical, infeasible, or impossible in to resuscitate the whole body? Why do we refer to 3 kg of human remains as a whole body when it isn’t? And I think that fundamentally it’s underpinned by this kind of fear of the body part. The body part isn’t the whole body. The whole body we can justify its retention of human characteristics.

So this is where I look at kind of the sociocultural underpinnings of this assumption of bodily integrity.  And while I do think it differs by context, especially religious context or cultural context, I still think there is this kind of, at least an assumption that makes claims to being universal about bodily integrity, where already we have to justify that human remains are human rather than objects. They’re objects in some ways, but they’re also not objects in other ways. So human remains occupy this sort of liminal space where they’re sort of a thing but they’re also sort of a person but they’re also not a person but they’re also not a thing. I think that when that set of human remains retains human characteristics, a face, a complete body, it’s much easier to justify its sort of lingering humanness and its worthiness of dignity.  But a body part doesn’t resemble a human being very effectively. And so I think that’s one of the reasons why body parts are so jarring and why it’s so difficult to fit body parts into our narratives of kind of what counts as human and of dignity of the dead and all of that sort of thing.

And the other reason is that body parts are often treated as objects in other contexts. We can transplant body parts from one person to another. We can harvest them from dead bodies and those don’t pose, at least significant ethical issues in the same way that treatment of human remains raises. Also we amputate body parts all the time and those sorts of dynamics.

It’s kind of interesting because some of these understandings have changed over time. So during the civil war in the United States they would bury amputated limbs the same way you would bury dead bodies. People who were still living but had limbs amputated. And there were quite a lot of amputations but they would bury them with dignity. We don’t see that kind of understanding to the same extent anymore.

But I think also disability studies scholars have pointed to some of the issues with the privileging of bodily integrity that because we…if you think about it, when children start to learn how to draw human beings, they start with a stick figure. It sort of has a whole head. It has two arms. It has two legs. It has a torso. And over time they might add, features, a nose, two eyes.  So what about the person that doesn’t have two arms? What about the person that doesn’t have two legs or the body that looks different? So I think there is this kind of default human from a visual perspective and that default colors our interactions with the dead. That the whole human is the human. So if you don’t have the whole human, what does that mean for our understanding of what counts as human?

And it’s one of the reasons why in the article in Death Studies I asked the question: what counts as a body, and what counts as a body part? Because I think some of these questions don’t have as easy answers as we might think. And it also helps us think through some of the assumptions that we often come to the table with that color our perceptions of other things, like people with disabilities soldiers with amputated limbs or some of these kinds of dynamics. And also how we think about the solution to some of these problems.

So if you have soldiers with amputated limbs, for example, and the solution is prosthetics, this kind of mechanical solution where they become superhuman. Then what does that say about people who don’t have prosthetics either who don’t have access to it or who choose not to utilize them? People who are born with disabilities or become disabled through other reasons? Does that make them neither human nor superhuman? What does that mean? And the sort of subhuman ways in which people with incomplete bodies have often been situated in both a historical and contemporary context. So it has a lot of implications that are wider ranging than just the post-conflict context too.

But once I started thinking through it, I found all these contexts in which bodily integrity was not only privileged but also considered the default. And I was interested in not only what implications that has for kind of our sociocultural understandings of what counts as a body, but also what that means for the privileging of certain techniques of resuscitation of the whole body after conflict, like forensics.  If the body part is a problem, then how do you fix that problem? It has to be through forensic identification. But what happens if local communities don’t want forensic identification? Or what happens if the spiritual and cultural beliefs of particular communities are that when someone dies, their spirit infuses all of the rocks and trees in that sort of environment?  And so it isn’t about the bones and the sort of tissue, that doesn’t retain the sense of who that person was any longer. So what does that mean? That we continue to hold forensics as sort of the end- all be-all for resuscitating the whole human when that might be at odds with some of these other understandings of what counts as a body or what happens to people’s bodies after they die or how bodies interact with their surroundings, like urban rubble or natural landscapes, and those sorts of dynamics. So what does it mean that forensics has become the default answer to the problem of body parts?

When our assumptions are that bodily integrity is something that we absolutely like must have in order to have some kind of justice or dignity.

Yvonne Kjorlien: So, we’ve talked a lot about sort of the rehumanization through wholeness, through regaining that bodily integrity and how organization, institutions, governments try to help with regaining that body integrity and rehumanization of the dead, not just for their national identity, but also for the family and the individual. So let’s take a moment to look at the flip side.  How do groups, governments dehumanize by focusing on the body parts? You mentioned earlier about deaggregating on purpose. So let’s talk a little bit about that because it gives a nice contrast to show just how deeply we are connected with this sense of wholeness as a human being.

Jessica Auchter: Yeah, I mean I think it’s no coincidence that dismemberment of bodies even after their death is considered a crime in many jurisdictions. But also from the perspective of international human rights law, bodily dismemberment is a human rights violation. So I think that’s no coincidence that that exists. I think one of the cases I find most interesting is that after the Bosnian genocide when you still had some of the Bosnian Serb militias that were roaming these areas even after the peace agreement, in a lot of cases they would return to sites where bodies were buried and literally take pieces of human remains and take them elsewhere and bury them because they knew that forensic excavations were coming. And some forensic anthropologists suggest this would happen even while forensic excavations were ongoing. Clea Koff’s book, The Bone Woman, where she talks about her involvement in some of these forensic excavations, she shares the story of this happening in the Bosnia context, where people would come in the middle of the night and they would take parts and ransack the graves. They wouldn’t take all of the human remains. So, it wasn’t an attempt to remove all of the evidence, but rather an attempt to both disrupt the evidence and remove the ability for people to resuscitate whole bodies.

Part of that is to sort of continue to hurt family members of those loved ones that wanted the whole bodies of their family members. Part of it was to disrupt the ability for forensic anthropologists to be able to tell the truth of what had happened.  Because if you don’t have the whole body then can you tell the story about how that individual died, it may be more difficult. So there’s a connection too with this kind of truthtelling. If you don’t have the whole body how can you tell the truth of what had happened?

You still can in many cases, but I think just the fact that there was this deliberate attempt to kind of move around these bodies testifies to the extent to which there are certain actors that acknowledge that deliberate dismemberment is a human rights violation, but a deliberate dismemberment is a direct attempt to hurt victim communities and family members of those victims.  And you see this a lot in authoritarian regimes also. I mean, I think the Jamal Khashoggi case was a very well-known case of a Saudi journalist who was killed in the inside the Saudi embassy, and then his body was dismembered so that there would be no evidence of the crime and also because it’s more practical to take somebody out in body parts rather than as an entire corpse from an embassy if you’re trying to cover up the crime that was committed.

But I think you starting to see this more as sort of a tactic, these kinds of forms of dismemberment. And one of the narratives that underpins this is actually a narrative of a gendered narrative where the whole body is seen to be masculine in its strength, and the dismemberment of the body is sort of emasculating in significant ways.  And you see this a lot in the context of soldier communities or of classic warfare where soldiers who are injured are considered to be emasculated until their parts are resuscitated through prosthetics and that sort of thing.

But you also see this as a deliberate tactic of belligerent forces in an attempt to kind of emasculate the forces of other communities is you see dismemberment of soldiers but you also see dismemberment of civilian communities especially women in some cases. And you often see mutilation of bodies as a tactic because it demonstrates that the community wasn’t able to properly protect their vulnerable. So, it’s not uncommon to see in cases of genocide women’s breasts be sliced off or something like that. So, you have to ask what does that tactic achieve in the context of a genocide? If your goal is to exterminate a victim group, why would you mutilate a body like that? And I mean there’s another conversation about the role of sexual violence in the context of genocide. But I think mutilation which often partners with sexual violence but can also exist separate from it, but mutilation of the body or removal of particular body parts can often be seen as a direct attack on the identity of particular communities. And often an attempt to emasculate what are often seen as being the male authorities in a particular community by their inability to protect the women in their communities. So you often see female victims of this kind of violence in the context of genocide. If we think about sort of mutilation as a performance in many ways in the context of these cases of political violence, it often doesn’t serve any tactical purposes, like it doesn’t make it easier for that group to win to carry out this kind of mutilation. An attack on bodily integrity is a purposeful attack on the identity of a community group. It has both sort of symbolic and physical dimensions. That’s one of the things that I think is so interesting.

And then in the aftermath you have this sort of struggle to re-envision what counts as a body, how do we navigate it?  And in some contexts, that’s where you see the advent of technology to come into play, like prosthetics for soldiers who have lost limbs and that sort of thing. You don’t typically see that to the same extent obviously in communities that have been victims of this kind of mutilation that I was talking about in the genocidal context, just because you don’t have the funds that you see in a case like you see in the US Army.

But you still see this kind of struggle to reckon with these narratives of what it means to be whole, what it means to be a real woman or a real man or a real member of that community. So, it’s no coincidence that groups take up some of these tactics toward that end.

Yvonne Kjorlien: Right. Right. And it’s not new either. I mean, even in archaeological contexts, we see that too. Desecration of graves, desecration of the dead, for an enemy to come in and do that sort of thing. And it helps demoralize and it’s a different type of I guess battle. It’s a different type of conquering or an attempt to conquer. But yeah, it’s not new.

Jessica Auchter: Yes. Yes. Exactly. But I think the fact that we see it as that communities see it and historically have seen it as sort of a valid or a viable tool for dehumanizing the enemy shows how much our sense of humanizing or human is bound up with this kind of bodily whole, the bodily integrity sort of idea.

Yvonne Kjorlien: Right. Absolutely.

Jessica Auchter: This narrative works like these actions work precisely because of the assumptions we hold about the whole human body. Which exists in different ways across a variety of religious traditions, cultural traditions, so I don’t want to say it exists everywhere and is universal, but it seems to be fairly universalized at least across many different contexts despite some of these kind of cultural variations.

Yvonne Kjorlien: Absolutely. All right. You talked a little bit about how forensic investigations particularly, in mass conflicts, or terrorism, like 9/11, have had to reassess what wholeness is and body integrity and how we kind of come to terms with that. What other, I guess, shifts or perspective changes have you seen or do you predict might come with body integrity, especially in Canada now with the graves and residential schools and the expectation that they want to find bodies in the graves, but of course they don’t want to dig up the graves to find the bodies because that would be disturbing them. So, is there a whole body under there? I don’t know. And that expectation that we want the whole body, but we can’t have it. So, how do… future perspectives on how we kind of deal with that?

Jessica Auchter: Yeah, I think that one thing over the last years that I’ve seen that I think we will probably see more of is what I think of as technological solutions to this sort of problem. So I mentioned previously the technologies of prosthetics and that sort of thing and this idea of the of superhuman, the sort of transformer kind of thing. I think that forensics is often already posited in many ways as a technological solution to the problem of the post atrocity context.

And some of the recent emergence of this kind of narrative of the human right to know. That there has been this kind of the idea that not knowing is itself a human rights violation in many ways or a violation of the human right to know which has been kind of discussed in human rights legal circles, this kind of human right to know and codified in various ways as I understand it. That isn’t my area of expertise but as I understand it there has been this emergence of this human right to know. I think this kind of idea reinforces is a kind of scientific expertise that already exists in the context of forensics, but I think we will become even more technological and even more dominant in the years to come. So, it’s like if you can’t excavate mass graves for cultural reasons at residential schools, you can acquire sophisticated earth scanning tools that will sort of enable you to be able to tell what’s under the ground.

So I think we’re trending in a direction more and more towards technical dimensions of scientific authority in ways that reinforce some of the narratives that already existed about scientific authority. Like the dominance of forensics that I talked about that sometimes you see even forensic excavations even when local communities don’t want them.

The reason for that is this dominance of scientific authority. You don’t know what’s good for you, but we do and we’ll get you the truth.

Yvonne Kjorlien: Right?

Jessica Auchter:  I think that forensic excavations have given family members knowledge of what happened, have allowed for legal prosecution. So it’s not that I’m necessarily critical of the tools of forensics. I think they’re incredibly useful in a post conflict context. And in many cases, victim communities do want them and there isn’t, enough money to support these kinds of tools. I don’t mean to suggest that, they’re not wanted more broadly by victim communities, but I think in some instances, they’re not wanted, but yet they emerge in some context because of this set of politics of scientific authority.  So I suggest I would suggest that kind of in years to come we’re going to see that scientific authority continue but it will manifest in more technological ways. I think I’ll say it has interesting implications for how we think about bodily integrity and whether or not bodily integrity can itself be technological.

There are some scholars of media that have suggested that the idea of what counts as human is already being re-envisioned by not only artificial intelligence tools and all of that but also by our existence as data doubles in a variety of systems. That for governments you are yourself as a material person but you’re also your data double as it exists in a whole host of bureaucratic systems. So what it means to be human in the eyes of the state or the governments, or something like that, may have already sort of shifted and changed from the materiality of human beings a bit.

I’m not an expert in some of those technologies, but I think that one of the trends that I’m seeing and especially in some of my other research on the visualization of war and how we visually represent human rights violations is that we’re increasingly seeing reliance on technological tools and technological forms of scientific authority. So I think that will have an interesting impact in bodily integrity and some of these debates. 

But the other thing that I think we might be witnessing is a move away from the body as the key representative of human rights violations, for example. So I’m currently working on a project that thinks through how the media represented the Bucha massacre in Ukraine because you have media reports on a massacre. It was widely characterized as such. But in very very few of the images that emerged, you see dead bodies at all. You see a lot more of destruction of property, environmental destruction, and that sort of thing. And even though there have been some incredibly iconic images coming out of Gaza also of dead bodies, the majority of images emerging out of that case also are of urban rubble, destruction and that sort of thing.  So if you look on the whole at some of these: what does a massacre look like? What does an attack look like? These sorts of things, it looks like destruction of property, not necessarily destruction of human beings, even though we know that that is occurring.

So I think there’s something interesting there also about the extent to which we are directly engaging with the destruction of human beings and whether or not the human is still the central ,I’ll say, thing that is being destroyed in some of these contexts from the perspective of how we interact with images coming out or reports coming out of these types of incidents.  So I do wonder also, like I said, I raised the question like what counts as a human body. I wonder whether or not and to what extent human bodies will still be the most relevant indicator of conflicts going forward. And maybe that is sort of more of a turn towards some of these technological representations. Or maybe it’s also something to do with the fact that people are sort of war-weary. and there’s just sort of too many human rights violations in the world, and so dead bodies no longer have the salience as images that they used to. Although I’m not convinced they used to have that same degree of salience that we often assume. I think that that’s also an interesting question to think about with regards to the role that dead bodies play in our sensitization for human rights violations or for conflict in the sort of contemporary era.

Yvonne Kjorlien: It’s an interesting point and something sticks in my mind that the death toll in conflicts has gone down too. During World War II there are how many millions of people died in a span of time and if we look at the same sort of span of time and in other conflicts since the death toll has decreased. So it’s almost like we’ve become more efficient in our conflicts. I don’t know so maybe we just don’t have the numbers we used to?

Jessica Auchter: Yeah, it’s going it’s becoming more technological that sort of war is a video game so to speak.

I mean I say that, but I think the other interesting trend that we’re seeing in addition with lower death toll is the death toll burden is shifting more towards civilians than it did World War II. The preponderance of people who died in war were soldiers, in the contemporary context, the preponderance of people who die in war are civilians.

I think it also raises questions about which lives and death matters. This kind of dynamics of necropolitics, the governance of life and death, the politics of life and death, is also a politics of which lives and deaths matter.

I think there’s an interesting dynamic here. I raised the question earlier about or the dynamic earlier that we think of dead bodies as human sort of, they’re sort of human, they’re not things  but they sort of are  but they’re sort of not that they occupy this sort of in between space. I think there is important context in which dead bodies sort of are valued in particular ways equivalent to or more than live humans.  So on several occasions Israel has traded live terrorists, so to speak, or those that they refer to as such, for the dead bodies of Israeli soldiers that were held. So it’s like we will take the dead body of our comrade back and here’s several live individuals that we’re trading for them. So this kind of valuation like it isn’t to pass judgment on whether that’s a good thing or a bad thing or whatever, but just to say that in different contexts different dead bodies have different degrees of value.

The amount of money that’s spent on identifying every piece of human remains after 911 when there was almost no forensic identification after the Rwanda genocide. These sorts of questions. And like you said even in the insurance industry the valuation of particular limbs. There’s also been some research on the amount of money that the US government has paid out for coalition air strikes that hit civilians. If you kill a civilian, then you pay the family members for the loss of that person but how much are they valued at? Apparently it depends, based on the context. Those numbers are not set and they change over time.

So I think there’s also this kind of larger necropolitics underpinning a lot of it. That we strive towards bodily integrity. It is this default but at the end of the day some bodies are still considered to be more worthy of bodily integrity than others. Some bodies are still considered to be accorded a higher value than others. And the same is true for body parts.  Some body parts are valued higher than others. And the effort put into the reaggregation of bodies is worth it in some cases and not worth it in other cases. And who has the power to sort of make some of these decisions also.

Yvonne Kjorlien: Fascinating. I feel like we could talk for days on this, but we’re out of time. So, thank you very much, Jessica, for coming on and talking about this very, I’m just gonna say, interesting. Hopefully we’ve started a number of conversations instead of stopped them and that people are intrigued and they’ll go look at your articles and your books and book chapters and read some more and learn about this.

Jessica Auchter: Thank you so much for giving me the opportunity to talk about a topic that I don’t get a chance to talk about that often because, as I said, for most people it is a conversation ender. But I really appreciate it. It’s been so interesting.

Transcribed by Google

Howard Williams is a Professor of Archaeology at the University of Chester, England, specializing in mortuary archaeology, and cremation in the early Middle Ages. His academic journey began at the University of Sheffield, followed by an MA in burial archaeology at Reading University, and a PhD focusing on early Anglo-Saxon cremation practices in southeast Britain.

In this episode we talk about:

Find more about Professor Howard Williams and cremation in the Early Middle Ages through:

Read and purchase the book, Cremation in the Early Middle Ages, via Sidestone Press: https://www.sidestone.com/books/cremation-in-the-early-middle-ages

You can also read the 2020 open-access edited collection Digging into the Dark Ages: https://www.archaeopress.com/Archaeopress/Products/9781789695274m.ca/

Notes from the start

The taphonomic impact of scavenger guilds in peri-urban and rural regions of central and southern Alberta. Part I – Identification of forensically relevant vertebrate scavengers (Journal of Forensic Sciences 2023)

Get Memoirs of a Reluctant Archaeologist, the first Elise Marquette novel, here.

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Do you have a suggestion for a topic on the Scattered podcast? Do you have a question about working with human remains? Do you have a search story to share? Email at [email protected] or contact me through the contact form on my website: yvonnekjorlien.com.

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Transcript

Yvonne Kjorlien: Thank you for coming on my podcast. This is a lovely, I guess, diversion from regular programming because I’ve been trying to get somebody on here to talk about mortuary archaeology and you are the man. Introduce yourself. Who are you? What’s your current role? And then we’ll get into your origin story and get into the nitty-gritty.

Howard Williams: Thank you so much, Yvonne. It’s lovely to be here. And yeah, my name is Howard Williams and I’m professor of archaeology at the University of Chester in England in the UK, but very much on the next to the Welsh border. I happen to live in Wales, just over… I see England every day. I cross the border. But the university is in England. and I live in Wales but I’m in that borderland. I teach at the university a range of topics and on archaeology programs to undergraduates, MRes masters by research and I supervise PhD students. I research a range of fields including mortuary archaeology, the early middle ages, and the history and theory of archaeology, and public archaeology. Death comes into all of those in one way or other. That’s who I am and that’s what I do.

Yvonne Kjorlien: Yeah, I find UK and Europe archaeology fascinating because we don’t really have those Ages here in North America.

Howard Williams: No.

Yvonne Kjorlien: We have pre-contact, contact, and post-contact. That’s pretty much, the overlying timeline. It fascinates me about the ages. So I’m always having to consult some sort of reference material because that wasn’t the basis of my training. The basis of my training was all North American. So anytime somebody says Middle Ages or whatever, I’m like, Google it. What is that time frame?

Howard Williams: Yeah. Yeah. these frames of reference are a curse as much as a blessing. And they bracket people in terms of what they study, who they talk to, how they define themselves.  So, yeah, one level I’m a medievalist in terms of I do work with historical sources as well as archeological resources, but it’s a very early historical period, so I have dialogue and a lot of constructive dialogue with prehistorians and across disciplines with anthropologists and others as well.

So, it’s a really fun period and region to look at Northwest Europe in the early Middle Ages, sort of in popular terms, early medieval Wales, Anglo-Saxons, Vikings, that kind of stuff. But it’s the period of time which has the most problematic and sketchy terms that get used and abused all the time. People are really interested in the early Middle Ages and not always for good and healthy reasons. But it is a time that is really fascinating because you have some historical sources, a lot of new archaeological finds. And so I’ve been interested in the history of that field and also the burials of that period in particular.

Yvonne Kjorlien: So, how did you get into it? Were you one of those people that kind of came out of the womb wanting to be an archaeologist or were you formed by other circumstances?

Howard Williams: I don’t know. I’ve often actually thought about what my origin story is and I’ve written it and told it in different ways when people ask it. So I’m probably sound, like I’m making it up because I keep changing my narrative because I don’t think there was a single moment I can’t recall. I was very much interested in deep time in natural history, in paleontology, in archaeology when I was very young and I suppose when I went to university I genuinely hadn’t a vision of a career in archaeology.  I just wanted to do a three-year subject. First generation going to university. I had an older brother who did physics with astrophysics and I thought what a subject would I like to do and I could actually maintain an enthusiasm with. And I say this to potential students as well because I think there’s a lot of perhaps hyperbole amongst people who do make it in the field that they choose and that somehow ‘I was destined to it’ and ‘I remember once my father said…’ or ‘my mother picked up a fossil and immediately I knew it’ was or that kind of thing but I don’t think… I just kept my options open.  I went on some few voluntary digs at the age of 16 18 went to university and did it at the University of Sheffield. I got a BSE archeological science in what was then a big thriving dynamic department of archaeology that sadly just closed. But in the 90s it was a real full of some of the big names in European and British archaeology. and then I went on and I just kept going with it really. So I did an MA in burial archaeology at the University of Reading with then professor Bob Chapman and Dr. Heinrich Härke, Professor Heinrich Härke and Professor Richard Bradley, some quite well-known figures in the world of prehistoric and early historic archaeology in Britain and Europe. Then I stayed at Reading to do a PhD, supervised by Heinrich, looking at specifically early Anglo-Saxon period that’s fifth-sixth century CE cremation practices in southern, southeast Britain.

So it was a really interesting three and a half years. Then I applied for a few lecturesships and was told don’t apply for lecturesships, you’re too inexperienced and you won’t get it and the fools gave me a job and at Trinity College Camarthen as a lecture in archaeology and that was in 1999 and then I was there for three years. I was made permanent but it was a very small place and I jumped from a permanent contract to a temporary contract to go to Cardiff University on a replacement job for two years replacing Professor John Hines, who was on research leave, who’s a quite eminent early medieval Anglo-Saxon archaeologist. I stayed for one year and then jumped to a permanent job at University of Exeter, was there for four and a half years. Then jumped again to the University of Chester, where I still am and they made me senior lecturer when I was appointed in 2008. Then I was appointed to a personal chair as a professor of archaeology in 2010 and that’s what I’ve been doing ever since.

So I’ve sort of went down the academic route quite quickly. I’ve done a range of field work, but also a lot of my work is desk based. I haven’t done active field work for about a decade for a variety of personal and circumstantial reasons, but I’m still actively doing research as well as teaching on those fields I was talking about.

Yvonne Kjorlien: What attracted you to mortuary archaeology? To the burials, the cremation?

Howard Williams: Yeah, good question. I mean it was my undergraduate degree at Sheffield where I was taught by, among others at UCL, Professor Mike Parker Pearson who did funerary archaeology module and I was also taught by Dr. Andrew Chamberlain, who is a human osteologist or biological anthropologist I think is the term now, and I get confused with the terms, but, you know, bones. Mike introduced me to the anthropology and the archaeology of death, more broadly. And then with Andrew and Beth Riga, as well, we did the paleopathology modules and the human osteology modules.

And so I thought this is really good stuff because you can get really a connection to, not only the lives and experiences of past people through their bones, but you can get in touch with and get access to and think about the complex ways in which people dealt with their own mortality. And it’s about cognition. It’s about emotion. It’s about identity and social memory and themes that really connect us today to who we are. I think we can explore in the human past through archeological evidence.  It’s not simply about just how people lived. It’s about how they died, how they engaged with the deaths of others. And so I thought that was a really fascinating field that connected up other disciplines, the history of death, anthropology and sociology of death.

And on my master’s degree, I was in a really interesting position because I was working on a burial archaeology MA with Heinrich and Bob. But we also had access to sociology professor Tony Walter who’s a big name in the sociology of 21st century deathways in Britain, and Ralph Hullbrook who’s a historian of early modern death.  There are people in other departments all interested in death and society, how we can explore the relationship of mortality to social conditions and how those change over time. So it was kind of a theme that just grabbed me undergraduate level and I just pursued it through and then when I did my PhD it was always going to be death.

And there’s been a lot of work done on the early Anglo-Saxon unburnt dead, the inhumation burials, where in the fifth, sixth, and seventh going on into the seventh century, we have a period where there’s a lot of furnishings, a lot of rich arrangements of treatments of the dead in unburnt.  But alongside that, there’s a lot of people who are being cremated and their ashes collected or cremains, as the funerary industry term is, and collected into ceramic urns often and put into the ground as well. And most of the attention had gone on the unburnt dead because they are seemingly a much more easier resource for in terms of human remains are better preserved, the artifacts are better preserved, and so most of the studies had focused on them but I knew there were very far fewer studies have been done on the cremated material. So I thought I didn’t do primary osteological analysis myself but I used the work of others and synthesized and analyzed the burials looking at variability and change over time in. That was just such a fascinating piece of work. Like most PhDs, you hate it by the end, but I think it was a really great choice to explore. So yeah, it was always going to be death for me.

Yvonne Kjorlien: You’re preaching to the choir. I completely understand. But when I tell people I have a podcast about dead people, they kind of look at me sideways. So, any time… the people who are attracted to death and the dying, we’re a different sort. And so, I always like to hear people’s stories. Yeah.

Howard Williams: I mean, I didn’t go through a goth phase or anything like that. It wasn’t like an extension of personal identity, which I know some people that is a thing.  And I’m not mocking it, in the same way that I know people go through all kind of, phases in their life of interest in particular things that stay with them and, help explain their trajectory, but, they’re no longer that. But I was never particularly religious. I’m not particularly spiritual. It’s nothing like that. And it’s not anything to do with a particular aesthetic or it was more about the rich promise of the data to allow us to get at past lives and people’s interactions with their mortality. That was the thing that captured my fascination. And it’s like what it could tell us about the past rather than something about me if that makes sense.

Yvonne Kjorlien: Right. Yeah, I understand. and you’ve just been, I believe, a co-editor on a recent book,…

Howard Williams: Yes. Yes.

Yvonne Kjorlien: Cremation in the Early Middle Ages.

Howard Williams: Wish I can waft at you just there you are. I know that’s a podcast but I still feel like brandish a book is always a good feeling.

Yvonne Kjorlien: The tangible. You can smell it and touch it.

Howard Williams: Yes. Yeah. Exactly.

So yes, I’ve published quite a lot of reviewed journal articles and book chapters, but I’ve also tried to serve the field and promote my collaborators work, and work with them on a range of edited collections and journal special issues. But my latest edited collection is a really interesting book because we collected it in a different way.  I worked with a doctoral researcher, now postdoctoral researcher, from the Netherlands, Femke  Lippok, and Femke organized a research seminar at Leiden where she was doing her MA and then PhD on cremation in the early middle ages in 2018, just before a year and a bit before the pandemic and all that. I said to her I’ve done a lot of publications on cremation in early Saxon England but there really isn’t a book, a resource, for student scholars cognit fields that looks at the whole of Northwest Europe and draws together the latest research. Because of course cremated material it’s more difficult to do but we’re increasingly getting stable isotope analysis we’re getting the paleopathological, the osteological data, the contextual excavation data, the quality of excavations of cremation burials is improved massively, our data sets are improving, radiocarbon dating, meaning we can date material that hadn’t previously seen. We thought how do we do this? Do we do another conference and then an edited collection or should we do something different? Because we started during the pandemic we said why don’t we do it by structured interview? Because I’ve been doing edited collections with student contributions and then expert contributions and found it very difficult to get the experts to write.

So in previous projects, I’d already been doing structured interviews to get and actually worked to get perspectives you wouldn’t otherwise garner, so almost like a podcast but then what I would do is then I would transcribe, or me and Femke transcribed, asked questions, sent the manuscript to the author, the author added in citations, images, tables. We also did key information boxes, fact boxes for key sites and key issues. And basically what we’ve produced is a kind of more like a textbook, but it’s written in an informal sort of Q&A style.

I think in doing that we’ve produced something that’s not just simply another edited collection about a topic in archaeology. It’s actually quite I think easy to read but actually there’s more depth and enriched …we got things out of people we wouldn’t have perhaps got if we just let them write. I think I’m really proud of it.  I don’t know how it will be received, but yeah, we’ve got 19 chapters covering all from Finland’s Sweden, Denmark, Norway, Poland, Germany, France, Netherlands, Belgium, and Britain and Ireland. So, I think I probably missed a few, but we kept to Northwest Europe, but we could have extended it further if time had allowed.

But yeah, and it’s kind of silver open access, so you can read it online on the publishers website for a year and then they’re going to be downloadable PDF after a year or purchasable from Sidstone Press. But yes, it’s almost fully open access. We got some money from the EU funded ERC project that Femke was working on to help pay for the open access.  So, we’re very proud of this. Yes, it came out like we had a book launch just before Christmas and I’ve put that on YouTube. We had a good chat and with all the authors and some extra contributors and yeah, it’s a first of its kind.

So, this was the last time in Europe that cremation was popular before the 19th century reintroduction of the idea of cremation and the early middle ages where cremation goes out for a variety of reasons including Christianization and socio economic changes in different parts of Europe in this period and then cremation was just a very minor weird thing that some people did through the later middle ages into the early modern period. I think this sits an important story for the story of Europe and attitude to death as well as the detailed archeological evidence that we’re able to pull out.

Yvonne Kjorlien: Yeah. I mean, that’s initially what hit me is that it’s a very broad topic and especially, if you’re just talking about Europe. So maybe give us some background about why cremation in the early Middle Ages, especially, it’s a thing that you need an edited collection about it.

Howard Williams: So obviously the story of death in the early middle ages has always been dominated by historical sources, but increasingly, since the 19th century, archeological evidence has helped to fill in the picture. These burials tell us about people’s life and their deathways and particularly since the second world war, 50s and 60s, across Europe, there’s been renewed dialogues over archeological discoveries that are telling the stories of the societies after Rome in the western Roman Empire collapses or fragments in the fifth century traditionally replaced by barbarian successor state. Some of them are Christian, some of them become Christian at various points. Right up into the Viking age, a time of invasion, diaspora, where there’s never actually a period in this period where there isn’t some invasion and diaspora.

But my point is, right the way through up to the 11th-12th century where we see the kind of more consolidation of European medieval states, kingdoms we see various different death rituals some of which are more perhaps familiar and fit into an orthodoxy of Christian practice and others that are either beyond or on the edges of that Christian world. And cremation has often been seen as pre-Christian or non-Christian. But it’s actually much more complicated than that. And the new archeological evidence and the new radiocarbon dating we’ve got is showing us that surprise, surprise really people aren’t doing what the church tells them. People aren’t doing what their kings are telling them. People are doing a lot of crazy stuff. We’re finding that local and regional patterns of the way people are disposing of the dead across Europe doesn’t really fit into any of these simple historical models. And at one level we kind of guessed that 50 years ago, but it’s really refining it now.

So to give you some examples — I’m dumbing it down massively, so if anyone who is an expert in these areas, hears this, please be aware — but the standard model for say, Ireland, the island of Ireland is that Christianity arrives in the sort of late fourth- fifth century, everyone converts to Christianity, Christian golden age. everyone’s, just dancing around colored green, happily being Christian culture and then the Vikings ruin it all and the Normans make it worse and then the English make it worse again. And it’s that story. But actually what the archeological evidence he’s finding is that actually early medieval Ireland, we’ve got evidence of not only burial away from churches is continuing right up to so from the fifth, sixth, seventh, eighth, ninth century,10th century and 11th centuries but cremation, something that would traditionally be seen as not Christian, is continued to be practiced right up into the 9th-10th centuries and people can argue to their blue in the face about how godly and Christian the early Irish were. Maybe they were but they were certainly not adverse to doing things that were not sanctioned by the church. I don’t think any churchman would had any choice or control over death rituals. At best they may be interested in how people getting people baptized but how people lived, married, and died is something the church couldn’t control until much later, centuries.

And so it’s kind of many people in who are specialists in the early middle ages would go we knew this already  But it’s filling in the gaps actually enriching our story with the archeological evidence to show yes and here’s the evidence. And if you talk to any scholars of later medieval Europe where the church is supposedly having all power and control, we know that’s not happening either. And there’s lots of local variation there. But my point is in these centuries that in Ireland that is traditionally Christian, people are still doing a lot of variable things with their dead.

And likewise we can see the evidence coming out from Europe is showing us in the low countries, in Netherlands and Belgium, cremation inhumation being used as options within societies for generations and generations. So as with perhaps our societies too, whether we’re talking about Canada, the US, Britain, Holland, France, people have options and people are exploring those options. It’s not always clear why people are choosing one or the other. So there’s not one early medieval death way. There are myriad of different ways in which people are disposing of the dead. And I suppose that’s the story we’re pulling out with the book is local and regional variability. N ot a simple narrative.

Yvonne Kjorlien: Because mortuary archaeology, as you said, can shed light on not just lifeways but also death ways and how the living treat the dead, it’s interesting when we have alternative options or perhaps alternatives or changes in the way things are done. And so I find it fascinating that, in your example for Ireland, if the church says do it one way, but then you’ve got some people that are doing it another way, to me that would speak of, there must be a reason why they’re not doing it the standardized or the, sort of ordained way by the church. What would that say to you?

Howard Williams: Absolutely. I think it says to me is that actually burial practice remains kinship focused. So I think it takes a long time, and perhaps never, that large parts of Europe have the church dominating deathways.  I mean, in urban context in the later middle ages, sure, but I’m just saying that – and, yes, people will be burying in churchyards from the 10th-11th century in England, for example, but it takes many centuries for that to formalize and those structures to be in place and even then I think there are only certain moments of the funeral where actual priests and other agents of the church would want to or dare to intervene on what goes on.

And so I think funerals are multi-authored, right? They’re places where the dead person might have a say, relatives have a say, neighbors have a contribution and perhaps have a say. And maybe religious specialists formalized and recognized and informal like the old woman of the village who washes all the bodies, will have a role in these kind funerary choices.  And I think that there are moments in early medieval Europe where practices might be a literal two fingers to the authorities, but I think in most cases it’s just more we’re doing this stuff yet, and if someone says, I don’t think you should be doing that. There are a few sources from early saying cremation was seen as pagan, but not so much, they weren’t so much interested in the cremation being pagan as human sacrifice, horse sacrifice, and infanticide being things that the church was more latched on to as things they didn’t want happening and eating horses as well. They didn’t like that. They saw that as pagan, but only in certain parts of Europe. So, it an interesting, it’s not so much burning the dead that was ever seen.  We don’t have actually a lot of evidence to show that anybody in the church was sitting around going, “do you know what’s really not on? Burning the dead. Yeah, I’ve always thought that.” There’s nothing in scripture that says this. It’s more… so I think a lot of this is down to — if I want to be crude about it –the kin still have the agency have the authority for much of the period I’m studying, the 5th to 11th centuries..

Yvonne Kjorlien: Yeah, so it’s not so much the church saying you should do this. It’s more of the church not saying —

Howard Williams: Or not caring.

Yvonne Kjorlien: Yeah, or not caring. And so the family is more open to do whatever they want or need to do.

Howard Williams: Yeah. I mean, we don’t have many cremations in churchyard context. So, I think there is a sense that cremation goes when the church starts to have control over the places of the dead.  But I don’t think it’s because cremation is seen as anti-Christian. It’s more about the move towards controlling the process and the places. I’m not saying it’s irrelevant, but I think our evidence is showing it’s a much more rocky and complex path towards that Christian deathways being controlled by how people are being disposed of. So yeah, by the time people are getting churchyard burial, no one’s being burned or very few people are being burned. But it’s about how they get there is a much more complicated route.

So, if you were going to do a historical drama and feature this, you probably wouldn’t have a moment where someone comes to Denmark in the 10th century and goes, “I say, I’m a bit Christian. I think you shouldn’t do this type of things, you heathen types.” And they go, ” Okay.” I don’t think that would have been a conversation that was on the tips of people’s brains in the period. These are all about practices that may have never been part of a discursive conversation. And that’s something that we have to remember when we’re dealing with death rituals is that even today it’s very difficult to talk about death. And then when people do talk about it, they may cook up explanations and justifications on the spot for things they never really thought why they were doing what they were doing. So I don’t see why we should see people in the past as any more necessarily self-reflective on these things. Again our evidence is messy because I think people are messy in terms of the way they think and what they do.

Yvonne Kjorlien: Absolutely. Absolutely. And then, it’s all if there’s actually evidence and if there isn’t, then what kind of story are we going to make up to fill in the gap?

Howard Williams: Yes. Yes. A lot of this is back-projected narratives of Christian conversion, are like Just So stories of people seeing the light or most of that would have been a much more complex process anyway. And, yeah, so absolutely.

That’s the kind of reason why I think that topic is important and why this book I think is going to sort of be a new level for future research to build on, both whether you’re doing the field excavations because I think it’s making a lot of field archaeologists aware that cremation is an early medieval thing in their region and place. Because I think a lot of the time when they’re finding cremations they’re assuming they’re bronze age or earlier iron age and they’re not even getting them radiocarbon dated.

There’s a internal, like making people aware you should be looking for this stuff in areas and periods where they wouldn’t otherwise look. And so I happen to know — and I can’t talk about it because it’s literally not published yet — that there’s one region we don’t cover in this book where I happen to know, as we were finishing the book, the first evidence of cremation practices from the early middle ages was found. And in the book I have to frame it in the introduction as we haven’t found any, but is that because people haven’t looked? And knowing I’m kind of right. I knew that now they’ve radiocarbon dated some of these undated cremation deposits rather than being prehistoric there turning out to be early medieval.

And so I think there’s going to be a lot more of that in the next couple of decades as people realize that they should be looking for this. Dating the very perhaps innocuous small deposit of cremated human remains with a bit of animal bone and you bit of flint and it could be frankly anything from the mesolithic right the way through to the early middle ages. Some of them are going to increasingly turn up being early medieval in date.

Yvonne Kjorlien: Well, that’s delve into that because I did have a question about, are all cremations in an archaeological context: are the cremains always in an urn? Are they always going to be found within an urn or…

Howard Williams: No, no, no. Absolutely not.

Yvonne Kjorlien: Is it just a hearth? And they could be mixed up with burnt animal bones.

Howard Williams: Absolutely, absolutely. And this is one of the key things is that traditions, like in my field of analysis when I was doing my doctoral research on early Saxon period cremations where most of the cremation is… at least a selection of the body is being collected up with the animals that were sacrificed on the grave goods. They were putting whole cows and horses and dogs on pyres with people as well as joints of meat, such as sheep or goat and pig. The dead were clothed, they had pots and they had food and they had all this stuff. They were then collecting bits out of that and putting it in an urn at some later date and burying it. And that gives you a discrete context. We often find that in many different periods and places across later prehistoric and early historic Europe and we find that around the world.

But no, you don’t have to do that. You don’t have to use ceramic. We have examples of other materials used as vessels from bark to leather to wood to bronze vessels. But also, you don’t need to ever there’s nothing telling you there’s universal rule that you have to collect up all the cremains and put them in one place, let alone put them in under the ground at all. 

So one of the things I’ve published on is the possibility — and we can come back to this as perhaps an interesting example of the absent dead — but in my period are we missing other burial rights that were involved at disposal above ground? One of the examples from the book is and one of the areas when I did my studies 22-23 years ago all my doctoral research, there was no attested early medieval cremations from Scotland, what is now Scotland, particularly the pictish territories of northern and eastern Scotland.  

During my Master’s, just before I started my PhD, I did field work at a site called the Clava Cairns, which are near the famous Culloden Battlefield of much later date and they’re now known to be early Bronze Age. They’re ring cairns and they’re very dramatic monuments and they’re now on the Outlander tourist trail because everyone wants to go to where that inspired the book that inspired the TV series. So the Clava Cairns are now quite a famous international, they were already actually quite famous in the 90s but they’re now extra extra famous. But we were excavating there and they had a secondary scatter of cremated material over the edge of one of the ring cairns and I jokingly said, “I bet it’s early medieval,” just because I was joking because I was one of the few early medieval archaeologists on the project. They were all prehistorians. I got, “Well, maybe.” I’m not trying to say I knew, but I just said it as a tease. Actually, when they got the radiocarbon dates back, this is Pictish, early medieval, it would have been. Now we’ve got more and more evidence that it’s not just these ethnic labels are all dodgy. It’s not just the Anglos and the Saxons, but also the Picts were also cremating the dead. And so this idea in the island of Britain, the idea there’s something ethnically or culturally Germanic about cremating the dead is nonsense. We’ve got clearly…

I’ll give you another example. I did a blog post only a few years ago, mocking the Bernard Cornwall adaptation of one of his book series, The Last Kingdom, where they had a fictional scene where a Cornish princess dies and Uhtred son of Uhtred and Alfred the Great, King Alfred, attend the cremation of a Cornish princess, because she’s pagan and Cornish in the late 9th century. And in my blog post only a few years ago I mocked that. I said that’s ridiculous. It maybe. But yeah, honestly, we know nothing about this. The idea that they would still be pagan in the 9th century and in Cornwall and burning the dead on in dramatic open air fires, I said, was nonsense. And I said, I can’t tell you too much, but let’s just say I’m going to have to eat my hat or eat my own words because it looks like we’ve got evidence now that in Western Britain as well as northern Britain, cremation was a thing. I’m not saying they were doing it as late as the 9th century. But, yeah, so Bernard Cornwall’s ahead of the curve as a fictional writer

This is the point is that we can mock sort of fictional portrayals of things but just sometimes by accident our evidence comes up that makes us go, “yeah, it wasn’t so ridiculous when they did that in that 1978 film or that book from 1985, or whatever it was because now we’ve got evidence of this.” This is one of those things where at the end of the day, we can be as confident as we want as academics, but the evidence is always going to challenge us and shift the picture as we find more out.

Yvonne Kjorlien: So it sounds like, if previously we had thought that cremation was either restricted to a time or a group or a region or even in how cremains were disposed of or buried. All of that is now off the table.

Howard Williams: Yeah. Yeah.

Yvonne Kjorlien: There are no restrictions for time, group, area, even, scattering the ashes above ground. It’s all fair game now.

Howard Williams: It’s true. And I mean, obviously there’s trends. I mean, cremation is very rare in some places. So one of the case studies in the book is cremation in northern France in the Merovingian and Carolingian periods.  So an area that is Christianized early, a powerful kingdom, very complex varied regionality but the Merovingian dynasties and then the Carolingian dynasties dominate western Europe.  We have very few evidence of cremation because everyone’s nominally Christian and church burial starts taking place earlier. But one of the studies in this book reports on a single cremation burial found in a Carolingian period settlement in the fill of a storage pit and with some artifacts that are very much comparable to those from southern Scandinavia and dating to the 9th, early 10th centuries. I think, I can’t remember that’s exactly the date, but in other words from the Viking period.  And so it’s very tempting to go, “Yeah, it’s a Scandinavian raider.” And it may well be because for some, while I don’t like to just jump to those kinds of conclusions, the Frankish Empire was hit hard by Scandinavian raids from the late 8th and 9th century, and we have much less archeological evidence of that than we have in England. We have much more evidence in the archeological record of those Scandinavian armies moving around, Viking armies. There’s been long waiting for more evidence from northern France of Scandinavian presence: raiding, trading and settling. Of course Normandy becomes a sort of, at least in part, a Scandinavian colony that becomes a king, a duchy, and then obviously a kingdom in its own right. So you have that origin story of Normandy. We have to have more archaeological evidence going to come out. Cremation seems to be part of that picture.

So, yeah, all that’s a fun thing about archaeology, isn’t it? We always get new data and sometimes it tells us something about the history and the historical processes. Sometimes it challenges that those historical parables.

Yvonne Kjorlien: That’s the fun of it. Just when you think you’ve got the story figured out, you get a new puzzle piece. It’s like, where does this go? How does this fit in? You have to redo the entire puzzle.

Howard Williams: That’s half the fun.

Yvonne Kjorlien: It is. So, because you brought it up, that the one in the cremation burial in France, that this has to be a Viking. What does a typical Viking burial look like?

Howard Williams: This is the thing.  So, lots of Vikings are very popular on social media and media and popular culture. Everyone’s heard of the Vikings. They may not have heard of the Avars or the Franks or the Gepids or any other groups from the early Middle Ages. And part of the problem is that the Vikings are so tied to modern nationhoods and various people’s fantasies of who they are, and now increasingly aDNA is informing ancestral commercialized DNA testing results. So everyone wants to a bit get in on the Viking action, from TV shows and video games to personal ancestry, identities. It links into racialized identities and we have a whole white supremacist and white nationalist angles to the Vikings in North America, in Scandinavia, in Britain too.

So Vikings are a bit contentious, and so when I try and talk about Viking burial rights, I try to make the point that there’s no single way of disposing of the dead that is exclusively Viking. In fact, no one in the early Middle Ages — there’s a good reason for that — no one in the early Middle Ages went around calling themselves Viking. It’s not an ethnic term in that period. If anything, most likely origin for the term is simply someone describing someone on the seaborn venturing, raiding, trading, an expedition over water is probably the origin of the term. And since the 19th century, in particular, it’s become a label we’ve increasingly attributed to a period of northern European history. So, it’s a bit of a myth in itself.  There was a thing called a Viking society or Viking culture at all and some people call it old Norse culture but that’s equally a problematic labeling as well.

So I suppose the point is for if you wanted to use it just as a period and regional term, Viking period mortuary practices in Scandinavia, in areas where Scandinavians settle are incredibly varied. They’re disposing of the dead, burning them, burying them on, obviously our evidence comes from on land. The myth of a Viking boat being set alight by flaming arrows is a hallowed tradition that goes back to 1958 and Kirk Douglas, as Einar, in the film The Vikings, so it must be true. But seriously, that’s a bit of a modern myth, but the elements are there.

I’m a bit late to the party of realizing that How to Train Your Dragon 2, the animated film, has the same thing. There’s many different renditions of this firing your arrows. The warrior chief goes off and flaming boats. But there are actual early medieval sources that speak of pushing people out in boats over water, of scattering ashes on water. And so water was important. But my point in this context is there’s no single Viking funeral deathway. They were doing all manner of stuff and that’s only the stuff we have archeological evidence for because they’re probably disposing of the dead above ground. As I said elsewhere, in Europe, they’re probably doing lots of things we don’t have evidence for. So yeah, there’s no such thing as a Viking way of death or Viking funeral. It’s really a modern mashup of mythological sources, historical sources, and a bit of archaeology thrown into the mix.

But you if I showed a Viking period burial site to your audience, most of them would go what’s Viking about this and I would say actually nothing. What you got here is an object that is Hiberno-Norse, shows it’s probably made in Dublin and traded around the Irish Sea. This object is probably from Norway. This object is from southern eastern England. These people had these range of objects they were burying them with the dead, the burial tradition they weren’t going, “he must die like a Viking,” or, “I feel a bit ill today. Got a bad stomach. Quick, let me grab my sword so that I can die like a Viking.” Like in The Last Kingdom, everyone has to grasp a sword so they can go to Valhalla, and it’s a bit nonsense. I suppose what I’m trying to say is there’s so much modern nonsense thought about the Vikings, it’s an ongoing task to remind people that actually our evidence is not what people would like it to be.

Yvonne Kjorlien: Yeah, that does the story that we make is not necessarily evidence-informed.

Howard Williams: Yeah, that’s a polite way of putting it. That’s the polite way. You’re much more neutral.

Yvonne Kjorlien: But fiction can be so much fun.

Howard Williams: But we do have evidence that were cremating people in boats, burying people in boats, and they may well have put people in boats and pushed them out into fjords and lakes, and they may have set fire to some of those. It’s not impossible. But we don’t actually have any archeological evidence of flaming boats that was, as per Game of Thrones, as per every fictional representation of the late 20th and early 21st century, either serious or comedic.

Yvonne Kjorlien: It makes for really good fiction, though. Makes for good drama.

Howard Williams: Yeah, it does. And people like the idea of a flaming journey, that the fire is not simply… but I think for most early medieval people, the fire is the journey, the fire, the transformation part of the …you don’t and the flames and the smoke. There’s a lot of animation in burning the dead open air. You don’t necessarily need to put it on a boat to have it disappear.  And I think a lot of that comes down to modern funerary industry ideas about a curtains coming down and the coffin is taken away from.  I think it matches up with our ideas of journeying and a spiritual idea that’s very Christian in some ways, even if, I’m not saying that everyone who thinks that way is Christian, but I’m saying it does fit into that our aesthetics and our expectations of death as a journey. And our fantasies and our fictions, from Tolken’s Middle Earth, to help us to navigate that in a very interesting way. And a lot of Tolken’s ideas were coming from the early Middle Ages and the mythology of Finland, Wales, but also Scandinavia. And so we have that sort of percolating through via our fantasy and our science fiction as well.

Yvonne Kjorlien: Do you think that media, the film industry, social media is going to be maybe more inclined to be open to archaeological evidence before constructing their story? Can you see anything like that happen or is it just human nature for us just to make up the story and run along with it?

Howard Williams: It’s really interesting, isn’t it? Because obviously I live daily with a sense of dread and despair every time I look at any kind of social media at what nonsense is being spewed now. And, yes, it’s very difficult to stay positive when you realize the level of misinformation about any topic, some of which you think what impact does that have on our world, through to the great pernicious earthshattering misinformation that is literally shifting politics and wars and responses to pandemics, and so on. So, it’s very difficult to stay positive. What I would say is that we have at least an opportunity to challenge, to push back. I’m not saying I’m not sure anyone listens, but I think we do have opportunities with social media now to push back and critique some of this nonsense for those who want to listen.

So, with AI imagery, with the ability to generate all manner of nonsense stories, myths and misconceptions of the early Middle Ages, whether it’s the Vikings and their deathways or anything else, are absolutely rife. And yet, I get a foot in the door as an academic to push back on some of that. And that’s what I try to do with my social media. And I’m not sure I’m doing it particularly well, but as I said, that foot in the door, at least I’m trying to do some of that because how the Vikings dealt with their dead may not seem to be something that matters; it’s something very academic, very esoteric.  But when you realize that some of these ideas about fatalistic conceptions of death, of warrior status, and warrior sacrifice and masculinity are feeding directly into various extremist movements today, if this helps people to think a little bit more critically about the basis of those ideas, I hope — I’m not saying I can directly — but indirectly you can chip away at some of that modern mythology by giving them good information.  And so it’s saying, “you’re wrong, it’s complicated”, “you’re wrong, it’s complicated,” may seem a bit of not a very constructive exercise with “that’s made up”.

Content has to be about storytelling and engaging people with fun stories as well. But I think there is the possibility that archaeology is being taken seriously. And I think that there’s been lots of discussions about where and how and with whom we should have these conversations about mortuary archaeology in the public domain. Should we be talk and I certainly feel strongly that I should not be talking with pseudoarchaeological grifters directly. I don’t want to have a debate with Graeme Hancock or any of these other people who have made careers and multiple books out of pedaling misinformation about the archeological record, but I do want to reach the audiences of people who are actually interested and for whom this may actually make a difference. Because it does have an impact even into fields as your own, with forensics, the things that, if we’re able to show that deep time human engagement with these death rituals, it does inform communities affected by disasters, by criminality of different forms, and what happens to their loved ones and hopefully their mourning, their restitution, their sense of restorative engagement. That’s what I’d like to think.  I haven’t done much work on that directly, but I like to think that if we are talking to the public in some form, we can help people understand what we do, wherever we do it. We don’t always get it right. We’re not perfect. It’s part of an ongoing burgeoning research field where methods are changing, ideas are changing, data is growing, but we are open. We’re not secretive like cabal, who are hiding the truth, which is what the rhetorics of pseudoarchaeology would have people believe about us and I think that’s really important to be open and dealing with those public conversations.

Yes, so what I’m trying to say is I often feel daily despair at what’s the point, but then I think a lot of people are listening and it’s rattling cages of those that would cozily sit there with their AI generated images of Viking warriors or Anglo Saxon funerals and I can say, “Well, actually, this is what we really know.” So I don’t know.

Yvonne Kjorlien: And it’s not like you’re just having a conversation with one person that isn’t recorded and can just, fade into the ether. You’re doing your due diligence to put it out there, and even if somebody doesn’t hear it in that moment, it is there for reference in the future.

Howard Williams: Absolutely. And I think that it’s people, I mean, while a lot of this the mortuary archaeology in the public arena stuff you say it has a short half-life, people are only watching my TikTok videos for half a day, but then they are finding them years later and getting occasional likes.  So people are searching for topics and finding a video I did about how we don’t actually have evidence that Picts were woad on their faces or that evidence of Anglo Saxon burial practice or what do we know about early medieval Wales, or I’ve challenged someone else’s narrative on something. They are finding it and I think that can be constructive. 

So, I just did a video a couple of days ago that’s gone not very viral, but it did get reaction. I reacted to a, I did a sort of stitch response to a very big and very good academic theologian Bible studies guy on TikTok and he’s great and we’re mutuals. But I said I don’t think his video explaining this late Roman burial was very good. I think he knew that I wasn’t having a go at him. I was able to say as a professor of archaeology these are the issues. While there’s a few people going, “look a drama between academics” actually it can be a really public forum to actually show the wider audience that we can respectfully disagree, we can show that — not necessarily, I didn’t actually disagree with anything he said but my points were that this is a news story rather than actual reviewed research but everyone’s commenting on this new burial showing the “rewriting the history of Christianity north of the Alps” is the story about a burial from near Frankfurt that has a third century silver case around the neck with a 18line Latin script evoking Jesus and St. Titus for protection. So, it’s a really international news story, really exciting archeological find. But I was saying that a lot of the commentators, including this very good TikTok creator who does Bible study stuff, are missing some key points.

So, I’m saying, we need to understand where this is and when it is and what it doesn’t tell us. We can’t tell…. And one of the things that an archaeologist, like myself, will try to keep emphasizing to the public is just because someone’s buried with something, it doesn’t mean they were that thing. So, just because you’re buried with an 18 line silver foil apotropaic prayer doesn’t mean you’re Christian at all. It just means that maybe someone gave it to you. I think it maybe, that’s a bit stark, I think there may very well be Christian. It is exciting evidence. It is the first evidence of Christianity north of the Alps. I’m not denying that. But I think we have to think very carefully about what we’re saying to the public about these things and qualify what the implications are.

And I think that is the job of where we can do…at one level we can be digital killjoys but also we can actually tell a better story by countering each other. Because everything’s so quick nowadays. There’s a rapid fire of press release reviewed study out and within 12 hours there’s 50 YouTube videos 89 TikToks and everyone’s written a blog about it. It’s very difficult to do that rapid work and still keep integrity. I think if we can improve our standards of doing that, start to work on how we do that responsibly and ethically, I think that’s something we academics can really make a contribution towards. Sadly though, there’s a lot of sensationalism within the academy too, and I think we’ve got to be very careful about how we balance this responsive quickfire reaction to new research.

Yvonne Kjorlien: I think that’s the beauty of that way information is nowadays, is that you don’t necessarily have to do it in the moment, because people are always searching. I think it’s more detrimental when somebody goes searching and they don’t find anything. It’s the same, when you were talking about cremation. Are people actually looking? It’s sad when people go looking or when they aren’t even going looking. But now they are. Even if an article is 5 years old, debunking or providing richer, more rigorous information at least it’s still there.

Howard Williams: I have great grave concerns about the AI scraping of my online content but equally at least I can say that some of my academic publications that are now open access after many years of not being, whether through my academia edu page or whether, people can go and consult them, and they can find out more detail. So, if they see a news article about a new archeological discovery –

And I’ve seen examples of this in my blog post, which I’ve been doing an Archaeodeath blog since 2014, of people going back to 2015, 2016 blog post I did about TV shows and films and going, “what did?” and I’m coming up in people’s Google searches about reflecting on The Walking Dead TV show series and how death is portrayed in it. I did a blog post about season 4 of The Walking Dead and how it represents cremation because I’ve done stuff on that kind of fiction as well. And people are actually reading that. They’re finding academics that trying to talk about those themes. Now, I’m not an expert in the zombie apocalypse but I am an expert in how people cremate make the dead.  So I can say firstly they’re technologically don’t know what they’re doing, but the key point is what does this tell us about this fictional future where people are trying to deal with an apocalypse and the undead walking everywhere. Why is even cremation featuring? What is the cultural baggage of 21st century North America particularly that is leading people to burn the dead in that TV show? So I’m able to sort of pick that apart a bit and sort of talk about what’s going on and I think people are reading it. Yeah. So I’m finding a lot of my old content is getting accessed and I think you’re absolutely right there.

Yvonne Kjorlien: So, I’m going to ask to maybe finish on pondering a question. What is the use of mortuary archaeology, especially nowadays? I mean, like I said before we started recording, I was delving into your recent blog post on necroviolence and that could be an argument for mortuary archaeology. It’s looking at how past deathways and lifeways have changed over time and show us how we are interacting now with our own deathways and lifeways. But for you, why continue with mortuary archaeology? what’s the purpose of studying it now?

Howard Williams: So, archaeology is the only field that can tell us the full human story from earliest times to our time and document even recent material engagements with material traces.  Mortuary archaeology as a subfield is the only way we can access the full depth, breadth, and complexity of human interactions with their mortality. That’s the way I would frame it to you. I would say it’s the only way we can draw on written sources, visual evidence. We can talk to even oral histories. That’s all lovely. And those can give us some really good sources. And I’m not just diminishing or disparaging other avenues towards understanding, but given that for 99% of the human story is prehistory, but also given how the stories of lives and deaths of most people living and dying today are not being told through historical, traditional, or sociological discourse, or verbal discussions.  We are the subject that can fill those gaps and provide a rich contextual story. It’s just local and global. We can go from the grand stories, the big narratives of how early the earliest people started to dispose of the dead. We have evidence that before our anatomical modern Homo sapiens, other hominin species were disposing of the dead. Massive debate about Homo naledi I won’t get into here but certainly Neanderthal. Yeah.

So we’ve got that deep time story and that is powerful and important to people today. It helps to then frame what we see going on in the world, whether it is in our own locality whether it’s in Gaza, whether it’s in Ukraine, to see not only how the importance of those traces of the deep past still matter to people today, but how they are politicized, afforded cultural baggage, misinformation. There’s all manner of ways in which those ancient traces matters today, but how we can see patterns in how we deal with the dead that we can trace from the distant past through to the way the importance we give to death today.

I think the other point to quickly add is mortuary archaeology is the only subject that can give us a sense and perspective on the future of our deathways. We’re going to see major changes in what happens to the dead moving forward. We’re in a world of cremation, but will cremation be the same? And will these other alternative technologies with their various complicated names that I never quite can remember. But you know that you know what I’m talking about. they’re all trademarked.

Yvonne Kjorlien: Aquamation, terramation, green burials.

Howard Williams: Yeah, we’re going to see changes, but I think what archaeology can show is, it can inform on a personal emotional level and on a societal level how we engage with the dead for the 21st and 22nd century. So I think mortuary archaeology is important because it tells us about the past, it tells us about the present, and it informs us about the future.

Yvonne Kjorlien: Lovely.

Howard Williams: That’s my thoughts, but I don’t know if your audience will think that’s nonsense or not. I think that’s why we should keep doing it because it reveals past lives and deaths, deathways, of dealing with the dead, but it also is about us and our future.

Yvonne Kjorlien: Death is a part of our lives. It just is. And yeah, I think mortuary archaeology informs us about our, like you said, our mortality and how we deal with that.

Howard Williams: And of course it hopefully, I mean, while it’s a much more emotion sensitive and legalistic context of forensics, I think there’s a lot of constructive dialogue, has been and will continue to be, a lot of constructive dialogue. At one level, forensics is a kind of sub field of mortuary archaeology in my mind and that may antagonize specialists because it’s like an application to a very specific set of deathways or not always voluntary, in that sense, but another level mortuary archaeology can be seen as sort of a deep time partner to what forensics scientists do. I’ve certainly contributed to books where forensic analysis of cremated material from all sorts of horrific and unmentionable scenarios are being discussed alongside bronze age case studies and Roman period case studies. I think that that overlap and dialogue is really important.  It helps to inform the methods and the perspectives of people working in forensics, I think. But tell me if I’m wrong, but I think that’s my sense of it.

Yvonne Kjorlien: No, absolutely. I mean, any advice that I had ever heard from people who found themselves in forensic fields or giving forensic consultations usually had a background in anthropology or archaeology and they always said the broader your foundation the better because it’s the principles and the processes that are being applied to forensic contexts.

So forensic as a field is very new and there may be some debate about whether it actually is a discipline but it’s really more the application of the discipline processes of anthropology and archaeology to that context.

Howard Williams: Absolutely, absolutely.

Yvonne Kjorlien: Thank you very much for this conversation. I wish we had more time. I feel like we’ve just scratched the surface. We could talk for hours and maybe I’ll reach out again and do another podcast episode because this has been very lovely, Professor Williams, thank you very much for this.

Howard Williams: Feel free. Thank you. It’s been great to chat. Thank you.

Transcribed by Google

Dave Sweet is a retired detective from a large western Canadian police service who now works as a consultant in Calgary, conducting workshops, training, writing books, and hosting a podcast. He retired in October 2023 after spending 14.5 years investigating murders and suspicious deaths. Most of our conversation is focused on death notifications and communicating with the next of kin.

In this episode we talk about:

You can contact Dave Sweet through his website: https://www.unconventionalclassroom.ca/

Transcript

Yvonne Kjorlien: All right, we’ll see how it goes. So why don’t you start by telling me who you are and what you’re currently doing.

Dave Sweet: So my name’s Dave Sweet, and I am a Detective from a large western Canadian police service and, currently, I am working as a consultant in Calgary. Do a lot of workshops, training, write books. I’ve my own podcast. So I’m sort of a jack of all trades, as it stands right now. Not seeing I yeah.

Yvonne Kjorlien: Your own podcast. How did I miss that? I’m gonna have to go stalk, and look you up! What?

Dave Sweet: Yeah. Yeah.

Yvonne Kjorlien: So, how long have you been retired now?

Dave Sweet: I actually just retired last year in October so it’s been, I’m just coming up on my one year anniversary of that, but I’m still a young man, so I feel like I can’t be too idle. I haven’t earned that yet.

Yvonne Kjorlien: Right. Thank you again for agreeing to speak with me. I’ve been trying to find somebody or some way to address talking with the next of kin and working with them regarding their either potentially or actual dead relatives. And I’ve always felt very iffy about approaching families to talk about that sort of thing because it’s icky to go and say, “Do you want to talk about how you’re feeling?” because I just find that very insensitive. So, thank you for coming on and agreeing to talk about this very touchy, sensitive subject.

Dave Sweet: Sure. And I recognize it as sensitive as well, but also I think hopefully we’ll be some valuable information for people out there, just in terms of when they’re dealing with their own crisis and tragedy into the future. We’ll all have one at some point in time. So learning a little bit about other families or how other people have approached that may help somebody listening have a better idea on how they might approach their own.

Yvonne Kjorlien: So let’s go back into your past a little bit and if you can maybe sketch out, maybe some situations in where you’ve had to deal with families and talk to them about their next of kin or, either a potential to deceased or somebody who’s actually deceased.

Dave Sweet: Sure. Yeah, of course. So my background really, I spent the last 14 and a half years of my life investigating murders, suspicious deaths. And, obviously, as a result of that, had the opportunity to speak many different families along the way and including having the opportunity to be the first person to advise them when a loved one had died. Often in tragic circumstances and situations. And something, I think came to learn early on, well, there’s a few things I came to learn early on when it came to notifying somebody that I loved one had passed, was one, make sure that when you went to do the notification that you had some facts, some information that you’d be able to pass on to them. Because there’s going to be an immediate need on their end and to understand kind of what has happened. And although you may not be able to know, you may not have all of the information available, you should be able to at least explain a little bit around the circumstance. The second, was to keep it truthful and honest, always. Never to sort of sugar coat an issue, but to, instead, be deliberate in the words and the message that you were giving. And that kind of leads into the next part, which was be direct in your message, specifically. And what I mean by that is that you can find yourself in a really awkward spot, if delivering the news of someone’s sudden loss, you used words like “they’ve gone to a better place” or “they’re no longer here with us.” Those types of phrases or messages often are followed with some really sort of uncomfortable questions, like “What do you mean? Where did they go?” And then would you still have to get to the place where you probably didn’t really want to be in the first place, which is being just completely direct and honest with them. And so I found early on learning from others, really watch them do it themselves that delivery could be done compassionately, but it should be always done directly. And so, you almost created a script, I guess, of sorts, that I used almost every time. We’ve all had this experience, I think where we have, we’re looking at the clock and we’re thinking, “Geez, my loved one isn’t home yet. And it’s weird that I haven’t heard from them,” and if a few hours go by, doubt starts to creep into our minds: “Where are they? What could be happening?” And undoubtedly, at some point in time, some of us, our thoughts might even switch to, “I hope they’re okay,” and “What would it be like if a police officer was to pull up to my home right now?” And we start to kind of pay a little bit more attention to the doorbell, the phone ring, the front of the street, our driveway, as we wait to see our loved one home and hope that everything is gonna be okay.

From my experience, often the delivery of bad news, it was already somewhat expected from families. And so, one thing I came to learn was, early on, was is that if somebody hadn’t, they woke up in the morning and their son or daughter wasn’t home yet, they began to worry. By 11 o’clock and they haven’t been able to reach them, they begun to really worry. So, by the time you show up at the house at one o’clock in the afternoon, their worst fear’s coming true, but I think they’ve actually already gone through a process where they began to sort of rehearse what that is going to look like. And so something I came to learn is is honor whatever that rehearsal is supposed to look like for them. They’ve kind of already decided how they would want the delivery of tragic news given to them. “What would happen if the police officer knocked on the door? Would I let him in? What I make him tea? What I want to know at the door? What would my reaction be to the news it in the first place?” And I think as an investigator, when we walk up to a door and knock on it, we have to recognize that somebody’s has already began to go through that rehearsal. And so really, they’re going to tell you how they want the news delivered. So, I’ll give you an example of it.

Years ago, I’ve done a notification, a young man had –a young father, actually — had gone out with a group of friends and they were enjoying the night. He left his wife and his kidlets at home and in the course of the night, they had found themselves at the house party, I guess. And while they were at the house party, there was an altercation, and in that altercation, he was actually fatally stabbed. And so, our unit was called out. We learned who he was and learn where he lived and learned a little bit about us his history and his life. I was tasked with another officer of going to the home and notifying, his wife of his death.

And I remember we pulled up that morning, it was about 11 o’clock, and she was doing exactly what I just described. She’d been kind of keeping an eye on the front street, waiting to see who was gonna show up and, oh my God, that looks like a couple detectives and a detective car that’s just pulled up in front of my house. And I remember as we’re walking up the front steps, to the home, she comes right out of the house and she stops right on the front step. And I introduced myself. She goes, “I know exactly who you are.” And she goes, “I know why you’re here. Does it have to do with my husband?” And I said, “Yes, can we come in?” And she said, “Absolutely not. You cannot come in.” And I said, “Okay.” She goes, she said, “Is he dead?” And I said, “Yes, he’s dead.” And I said, “Are you sure you don’t want us to come in?” And she goes, “You can’t come in. My son is having his birthday this morning and we have a whole bunch of kids over to the house.”

Yvonne Kjorlien: Wow.

Dave Sweet: “And we are not going to come in and ruin that for him today.” So, she had a short conversation with us out there on the stoop, and then asked us to leave, which we did, and asked us to come back the next day, and we would do the actual delivery of the news to everyone in the home including the children. That’s exactly what we did. But she had already scripted out, this is how she wanted this to be done, for that particular, for her family, she felt that was the right decision to be made.

And so that’s what I mean by people have kind of already scripted it by the time, we’ve even gotten there. And so you have to be very, you have to kind of improvise off of what they’re telling you they need from you at that moment in time. Because, again I say, in a lot of cases, by the time we’ve shown up, some time’s gone by, worry is already set in, and then we’re just the confirmation of what they think me have happened, which is that their loved one has died. And so that was just sort of the things I took away from the notification process when it came to families.

And, depending on how the notification went, those first few words out of an officer’s mouth, out of my mouth, we’re gonna put a family on one of two directions. One, they were not going to be able to get past the sort of trauma of that initial notification experience, or the notification itself could be the catalyst to already putting people on a path where they are going to get … not past it, but be able to put them on a path where you give them a greater chance of being able to heal from the horrible news that they’re already to hear. You can imagine, it could go one of two ways. If the officer that shows up there’s aloof, doesn’t know a lot, stumbles over the victim’s name, doesn’t use direct language, leaves things innocuous, in terms of what is actually occurred. How difficult that will be for the family going forward? They’re going to play that whole scenario over in their mind. It just adds to the trauma.

Versus, you have an officer that shows up at the door and they’re professional. They’re clear in their message. They’re compassionate, and they follow the script that that person wants them to follow. You put them on a much closer path to healing early on. And so, the notification process is a huge part of what, I won’t say, my daily duties, but certainly my weekly duties, while I spent that time in Homicide.

Yvonne Kjorlien: Were you given any guidance or training and how to do a notification?

Dave Sweet: Over the years, they started to put together a course — courses I guess — that would help prepare officers on how to do it. But, no, in those early years, no. It was sort of all based around experience and the experience of watching other officers do it. It’s actually interesting because the script that I used was one that was taught to me when I was just a little baby police officer in uniform, and it was the same script that my officer coach used that I then adopted, and then just kind of built on over time with experience.

Now, not every notification, of course, goes well. You can do all of your best, but people go through notifications in different ways. Some are just completely grief stricken and they can’t get the words out. Others kind of almost go into a shock. And can’t get the words out, but are really avoid of emotion. And then other people become extremely volatile and emotional, and can demand you that you leave or get out of my house, or throw a shoe at you, or take a swing at you. These of all things that have happened, not just necessarily to me, but to other members that I had worked with over the years. And, yeah, every notification was a little bit different, but again, it always came back to sort of recognizing people’s needs and that every victim and every victim family is a little bit different as well.

Yvonne Kjorlien: So if watching TV and the detective says, the person on the receiving end of the notification didn’t react the way that they thought that they should react, and, the storyline says that that’s indicative of something, that’s probably not quite accurate then?

Dave Sweet: Sure. I would agree with that. I would agree that it probably not too accurate because we have, as people, so many different individual responses to something so traumatic that I don’t think you can look at one response and say that qualifies as being more genuine or honest than another response. Like I said, I remember once going to a home of a woman, who’s barely twenty-something. Sun had been killed at a house party in sort of a beating and stabbing. And when we went to the home, she was so sweet. She was so kind, and she brought us in and she wanted to make tea first. And so sat on the couch and sort of made some small talk with her. She prepared the tea and then sat down. We delivered the news and she just stared straight ahead. She just absorbed it, but said nothing and was completely, really void of, I would say, any emotion.

I remember putting my hand out — I don’t offer into somebody else’s hand, but I would always kind of leave my hands open, just so that if somebody wanted to they could hold it, but I let them kind of come into my space versus me going into their space. But she took the opportunity to grab my hand. I remember just kind of holding my hand and cupping that and just kind of staring straight off into the universe and she just held it probably for 10-15 minutes. She cry, she didn’t do anything. She just held it.

And I would say that that was a really unusual reaction. But I would also say that it’s a reaction of grief, no differently than a person who falls to the floor, begins to wail, which also sometimes happened.

Culturally, people are different as well, in terms of the way they react. Some cultures, wailing and being very, very open about their grief, is more commonplace in sort of shutting in like she did, right? And so you have to be prepared for that as well. Yeah.

Yvonne Kjorlien: It sounds like empathy and, like you say, improvisation are two key elements when you go to notify somebody. Do you find that there are, perhaps, some people that are better suited to deliver notification than others, because they have more empathy or improv skills?

Dave Sweet: I do, actually. I do feel that way. Yeah, in anything, it’s a skill set that some people are really, really great at some aspect of police work. And then others are better at a different aspect, like notifications. I think the ones that are skilled at delivering difficult news ones that are not afraid to use that, again, kind of direct language, find a way to be able to use it in such a way that still comes across as compassionate and empathetic. And one thing that I often speak about is one of the greatest a-ha moments I ever had as a police officer was learning the difference between sympathy and empathy and how uniquely different those two things are. [Brene] Brown. I’m not sure if you’re familiar with her but she,…

Yvonne Kjorlien: Yeah.

Dave Sweet: She really has this thing nailed, this concept nailed. She talks about sympathy as being a real disconnecting or separating action. While empathy is very connecting action.

In her analogies that I’ve seen her do in the past, one of them is that, if you have a friend that’s… you’re walking down the street and you come across a friend who’s fallen in a hole, a sympathetic person will walk to the edge of that hole look down and say, “My goodness. I’m so sorry to see that you fall down the hole. Do you need any help?” And, because you’re practicing sympathy, the friend that’s fallen in the hole’s likely gonna say, “No, I’m okay. I’ll figure it out,” because you’ve kind of disconnected, in that display of “I am sorry.” Which are sort of the three words to a sympathetic reaction to somebody else’s tragedy, “I am sorry”, but they’re the three most common words that we use. “My condolences”, “I’m sincerely sorry”, “I am sorry” –these are all forms of sympathy.

The empathetic person, in that same situation, is walking down the street and they come across their friend who has fallen down the hole, the first thing they will do is acknowledge that their friend is fallen down the whole, they might say something like, “you must be so scared. I see you fall down that hole right now. You look cold. Give me one minute. I’ll be right back.” They leave the edge of the hole, come back with the ladder. Stick it at the end of the edge of the hole, climb down, and then help that person up and then they climb up with them. Right. That’s empathy and empathy that it’s about getting into the hole with somebody to kind of move through that with them. It requires vulnerability and that’s why it’s so connecting. Because there will be an exchange there. I’m going to come into the same hole as you. I’m gonna make myself vulnerable so I can be with you and then we’re going to climb out of this together. That is very connecting.

And so, how does this all matter when it comes to things like notification? I think when we can practice more empathetic responses, and try and stay away from, “I’m so sorry for your loss,” and instead, “I don’t know what you must be going through right now. But if I can do anything for you, call a friend, call a family member, sit here and hold your hand, you’re my priority right now. And I don’t want to leave you until I know you’re going to be okay.” That’s different than saying, “I’m sorry for your loss.” And so that skill set, it takes time to hone it and it takes time to sharpen it, but once you’re able to start to use empathy, whether it’s a notification or any other interaction in your life, it’s a game changer when it comes to relationships.

You could save a marriage once you figure out empathy is different than sympathy, and so you could save your marriage. I’m sorry…

Yvonne Kjorlien: Here we go. Marriage advice on this podcast. I never thought I’d hear it.

Dave Sweet: Yeah. “I’m sorry to hear that the baby was crying all day” versus “I can’t imagine. I know how frustrating is for the baby to cry. When I get home today, I’m going to give you the much needed to break you need. And I’m gonna take little Johnny with me and we’re gonna go for a walk.” That’s different than saying, “I’m sorry. The baby was so colicky today.” You know what I mean? So we can start to practice that and we can do that in all aspects of her life. You don’t have to be doing it in a tragic situation to create that connecting response.

Yvonne Kjorlien: So, that’s notification for a deceased. How does that differ for a missing person when there isn’t kind of that ending. How do you deal with that?

Dave Sweet: I think everybody would have again that sort of a different view on that and, I mean, I respect all of them, I think every, for myself, if I was… So typically we don’t do the notification on the missing person because it’s usually the family member that you would notify [who] has reported that individual missing in the first place.

Yvonne Kjorlien: Mm-hmm

Dave Sweet: So the notification, like they’re the ones notifying us at this individual’s missing. But there is going to be a process that it’s going to still occur where, over the course of a period of time, that individual isn’t just going to be missing, but that they’re — in some instances, not on all, but in some instances — evidence starts being collected in the course of that investigation which starts to lead to a more ominous result of why they may have gone missing.

That’s when, I won’t call so much a notification, but it requires a lot of communication with the missing person’s family to get them to start to realize that this may not have the fairy tale happy ending. And that just requires, again, a lot of empathy, a lot of listening, and a lot of inquiry where you will start to message that things may not be quite so well.

It might start with, “in a case like Bob’s, sometimes we start to collect evidence and sometimes in the course of collecting evidence, we start to become more and more concerned about Bob’s wellbeing. I feel that specifically as it relates to Bob, at this point in time, we are starting to collect some evidence that is causing me some concern.” Right. We won’t actually know until we find Bob what happened to Bob, but you can start to sort of layout that messaging. “What think happened to Bob? You’re his mom. What do you think happened to Bob?”

Yvonne Kjorlien: Mmm.

Dave Sweet: “I think Bob might be gone. You know, a mother always knows these things.” “You might be right, you may not be wrong. How are we going to prepare for if that’s a possibility into the future? Do you need family to start to come be around and support you. We’re gonna work our very best to try and figure out what happened to Bob. And we’re figure out where Bob might be, but in the interm, do you have a support system around you?” Right? “On the chance that your intuition as a mother isn’t wrong. And that we do find Bob deceased…” So that’s kind of where it changes a little bit. I think it’s a little bit more of putting a person — again, it’s a lot of it’s messaging — but putting a person on a path where they start to identify what the conclusion could potentially be, just through how you explain things. It’d be completely irresponsible for an investigator to come in and promise somebody something like, “I promise we’re gonna find Bob.”

Yvonne Kjorlien: Right. Yeah.

Dave Sweet: That would be something that would be terribly damaging to the family because I don’t think, in any of these scenarios, I don’t think it’s our job to destroy hope, but I also don’t think it’s our job to create false hopes either. I think it’s our job to be very realistic and always kind of keep people mindful that all possibilities exist until the investigation’s completed or until Bob is found.

Yvonne Kjorlien: Do you think that there is such a thing as closure?

Dave Sweet: Closure? I guess it depends on what way. If what was important in a missing person’s case, for example, was that the discovery of their loved ones remains and those remains are discovered? Then I guess, from that perspective, there’s some closure, if that’s what was the most important thing. If a family feels that closure comes by way of just some sort of form of justice, I would say the jury’s out on that. I’ve found very few families in my career who felt like a sentence imposed against an offender, that’s done something horrific to their loved one, was the just and fair decision or fair result. Very few families go, “You know what? They got it right on that. Yeah, he only deserved 15 years for the murder of my daughter.” It doesn’t usually happen that way.

I always used to remind families, though, that the decision that occurs in a courtroom and then the sentence that follows, it’s sort of a cruel reality but sentence isn’t for the victim or the victim’s family. The sentence is for, is imposed for the offender and for the community that that offender will one day likely return to. And so, no sentence imposed will be probably good enough.

I remember I used to have this conversation with families before a sentencing. I’d say, “a number is a number and it doesn’t represent the love or the life lived of the person you’ve lost. If the decision is made that the sentence reflects 10, it’s a 10-year sentence, you will wonder why it wasn’t 15. If the judge came back and said it was 15, you would wonder why it wasn’t 25. The judge came back and said life forever and ever and ever, and you’d want to know why it wasn’t death. If the judge had stab wounds. Like, they took my own.” Where does it stop?

And so, families that can resist that, sort of going through that process, usually do a little bit better on the other end when they can separate out the process to the loss. When they equate the loss to, say a number, I think they have the tendency to stay angrier for longer, which is totally a natural response. But those that can find the strength not to do that, I think they actually, in the end, probably do a little bit better, just based on my own experience, in terms of being able to — not close it off, but to — switch the focus of the loss onto something maybe a little bit more positive, like a legacy for example. A foundation, an organization, a scholarship in their loved one’s name. Yeah.

Yvonne Kjorlien: Yeah, the reason I asked is that there’s always, I think, this expectation that once you’ve found your missing person and either they’re alive or they’re dead, you found the remains, that ending provides closure or going to trial, the person being found, guilty gives closure. There’s always some perceived endpoint that is going to give me this miraculous closure. This fabled thing. And I’ve heard some families say that, “You know what? No, I never did feel the closure.” You get all those endpoints and there’s still no closure.

Dave Sweet: I actually understand that perspective because, even as an investigator, you’ve put all these hours, months, maybe years into an investigation, into a case. To hear the proverbial gavel drop and the determination of guilt come through, you’d think inside you would be rejoicing, but you’re not. You find that experience very anti-climactic. You knew it was gonna be that way, but it didn’t make you feel the way you thought it was gonna make you feel. Once you get to that point, and the gavel drops, you think inside you’d feel, “YES! All my hard work has got us to this point.” But it never felt that way for me, anyways. I didn’t look at it and cheer out loud or any of those things. And it just felt a decision was made, but it was never quite as joyful or as exciting as what you thought it might be, I guess.

And I think for families, yeah, I don’t think, especially when it comes to missing — if a person’s gone missing, let’s just say it takes a year before there remains are found, and by the time they’re found, it’s not intact remains. Let’s say they were found in the woods or wherever, and they’re not impact anymore, there’ll still not be closure. There’ll be closure on the fact that we can now prove positively say, through the skillful expertise of our anthropologists and people like that, we’ll be able to say, “Yes, we know who this individual is, but there wasn’t enough information left behind with their remains to tell us exactly what happened to them.” And so, yeah, you’ve discovered that their fate, their fate being that they died. But there may never be enough information available to tell you how they died or if somebody was involved in it.

So yeah, you get a closure on one end: you’re no longer looking for them in a crowd. Sometimes people they do that when they’ve lost somebody is missing. They can spend years looking in crowds for them. And I had a friend that talked a little bit about that with me from a personal experience, where, after her father had passed away, she couldn’t believe that he had died. She used to look for him all the time in the crowds, hoping that he’d be there. And she never saw him, of course, but I think that experience is probably tenfold for somebody that’s has a loved one that’s gone missing.

And so, now, we found them, but there’s still a lot of things that need to be explained. So you’ve closed off one thing, but then you’re on to the next thing. And then once we get to the next thing, which is maybe we identify that we do know how they died, and we know who’s responsible for their death, then will the court case provide us closure? It may or not. Does a guilty verdict or a guilty plea give a family closure? Maybe. Some families. But maybe it’s the sentence is the next thing you move on to. That’s what I say by, I don’t know there’s ever a complete closure on any of these things. Yeah.

Yvonne Kjorlien: Yeah. Yeah. It’s sounds like a bit of a roller coaster of expectations, unfulfilled expectations.

Dave Sweet: Yeah, it such a great way of saying it, and then I agree with you. I think it probably is for a lot of families.

Yvonne Kjorlien: The remains that you brought up, when remains are not intact and they’ve maybe been out the woods for a bit or in the water, and the investigation has done as much as it can with the remains to figure out who the individual is, what happened to them, etc, and you’re now ready to turn them over, release them to the family. In your experience, how do people deal with not having an intact relative?

Dave Sweet: Mm-hmm. You know, honestly, we almost start to venture a little bit out of my wheelhouse. I feel like that would be.. unless somebody actually expressed it to me, and I guess a couple families have over the years.

Yvonne Kjorlien: Do you ever get anybody that says you should have tried more, you should have looked more, you should have done more?

Dave Sweet: I mean I’ve never had it to… the short answer is, I don’t know that I’ve had that happen in one of my investigations, but I’ve seen happen to other investigators. Where we’ve recovered partial remains, there’s been a great effort to try and recover the rest of the remains but we’re unsuccessful. Maybe they’ve gone to a landfill, or something like that. So, we were able to recover some but not all. I mean, that obviously leaves people with a terrible sense that the body has not been returned to them intact. And they might become frustrated with the police.

I actually saw this play out, we just saw this play out not that long ago, I think in Manitoba, I don’t know if it was in Winnipeg but they’re,…

Yvonne Kjorlien: All right. Yeah.

Dave Sweet: and you feel for those families. And I understand their grief on… well, how can I even say I understand their grief? I’ve heard their perspective before. I’ve never been in the situation where I can understand their grief, but I’ve heard their perspective and it’s certainly shared and a natural perspective. But I’ve also looked at it on the other side of it and realize how — it doesn’t mean that you don’t try — but how daunting a task that would have been with such a low probability of result.

Yvonne Kjorlien: Right.

Dave Sweet: And, I have been part of cases similar to that, where we recovered some of the remains but weren’t able to recover all of them, despite everyone’s best efforts at some point sometimes you just have to say that it’s just not going to happen. Right? Landfills are a great example of that, just because the vastness of the landfill you don’t think that they’re that big until you’re out there standing on a pile of garbage. That’s, however, many feet deep and,…

Yvonne Kjorlien: It’s the depth. Yeah.

Dave Sweet: it’s the depth and kilometers around. Like you don’t.. there’s not necessarily a way of knowing exactly where garbage was deposited or dropped. So this becomes very much the proverbial needle in a haystack. And I do think that we have to try. But I also recognize that it’s extremely limited at some point, and some time also have to know when to fold them. Yeah, and that would be a conversation to have with the family. Yeah.

Yvonne Kjorlien: Yeah, again that roller coaster ride of expectations.

Dave Sweet: That’s right. Yeah. But I think, depending on how it’s approached from the beginning, it could potentially help a little bit with people understanding that, right? Like, if it was just, again, it comes back to that messaging and making sure people, the expectations are outlined early and I’m not saying that they’re not in these cases, but I do think that expectations and managing them are very, very important parts, especially in those early days of any investigation. Yeah.

Yvonne Kjorlien: Right. Let’s finish on a happier note.

Dave Sweet: This wasn’t happy? This is strange, sure.

Yvonne Kjorlien: Tell me about your podcast, Dave.

Dave Sweet: Sure, yeah. So just was something that I wanted to do. I kind of alluded to it earlier when I was talking about families and they’re like, their need to or I think that’s something families can do when they’re going through tragedies and things is to kind of look outside of the things that aren’t in their control – like sentences and that — and to start to focus more on legacy. And so, one of the things I thought would be important, for myself anyway, is to have just a little podcast that would capture my thoughts, and my voice, and my face, so that one day, a great grandchild that I may never know, maybe able to watch it and say, “You know, the way he thinks or the way he says certain things,” or “I’ve got his nose” or “I’ve got his hands”. That they’d be able to find some familiarity. So the podcast is really sort of a continued effort on my part to leave a bit of a legacy on this earth because I certainly know that tomorrow is not promised to any of us.

And so, my podcast is called The Ride Along. And it’s a feel-good true crime podcast. It’s very much themed in around even some of the things we talked about today. It’s sort of falls that seem kind of theme where hopefully it doesn’t leave people with too much of a heaviness, and maybe some validation on what we can do to live better lives and learn a little bit about what happens when tragedy’s our teacher, and how we can respond to that and take positive takeaways from it. So that’s what’s it’s called The Ride Along, it’s with me and my co-host, Nicole McKay. And you can find it on Apple and Spotify and YouTube, as well.

Yvonne Kjorlien: And you’ve also got a website. Isn’t that correct?

Dave Sweet: I do. So, my website is, it can be found at http://www.unconventionalclassroom.ca, and there you can learn a little bit about some of the workshops and training opportunities I provide. As well, there’s also the other services that I give as well.

Yvonne Kjorlien: Fabulous. Thank you very much, Dave. This ha been enlightening, insightful. It’s everything that I wanted to talk about with yeah, regards to this topic but without the ‘ick’ I was really trying to avoid. All this sensitivity but with none of the ick. So thank you.

Dave Sweet: And I hope it helps somebody out there. And somebody’s going through a tough time. Like, there are people that are out there that will help, you just need to reach out to them. And hopefully you have a supportive friend in your life or a supportive family member, but if you don’t, victim services, most police agencies across this country have them. And there’re also great ways of being able to help you through your grief, loss. Hopefully no money is there and is ever part of this exclusive horrible club that a few families every year have to become part of, but if you are, just know there are people out there that will help you. Yeah.

Transcribed by Google

Professor Victoria Gibbon is a biological anthropologist at the Department of Human Biology’s Division of Clinical Anatomy and Biological Anthropology at University of Cape Town, South Africa. She leads a transdisciplinary team of researchers in the Western Cape Cold Case Consortium (W4C) to assist with improving investigative outcomes and forensic identification more generally. Dr. Devin Finaughty is a forensic anthropologist/taphonomist with a particular interest in the decomposition ecosystem. South African-born, he is a centennial postdoctoral research fellow at the University of Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, South Africa.

In this episode we talk about:

Find more about the work Devin and Vicky and others on the team have done together:

https://health.uct.ac.za/anatomybioanth/forensic-taphonomy-identification

****

Notes from the start

Support the podcast and my research and Buy Me A Coffee or Patreon. Your contributions will go toward my research, webhosting, and my time on this podcast. Want to find out more about my research? Check out the Scavenging Study.

Contact me through [email protected] or through my contact form. Follow me on Facebook at The Reluctant Archaeologist, or through Instagram @yvonnekjorlien

Do you have a suggestion for a topic on the Scattered podcast?

Do you have a question about working with human remains?

Drop me a note at [email protected]

Transcript

Yvonne Kjorlien: So, I’m gonna get you each to say your names because I don’t want to say your names incorrectly. So, Devin let’s start with you since you have the name I’d probably end up saying incorrectly.

Devin Finaughty: Okay, so it’s Devin Finaughty.

Yvonne Kjorlien: Finaughty, all right. Vicky.

Victoria Gibbon: Victoria Gibbon.

Yvonne Kjorlien: and you are both, not currently located, Vicky, but you are both teaching in South Africa. Is that correct?

Victoria Gibbon: I can speak for myself. Yes. I am a university professor at the University of Cape Town in South Africa.

Devin Finaughty: And I am a centennial postdoctoral research fellow at the University of Witwatersrand in Johannesburg in South Africa.

Yvonne Kjorlien: However you want to start, maybe Vicky if you want to start with your academic background and then we’ll bring in Devin and then Devin you can go through your academic background. How did you get involved, I guess, with forensic taphonomy. What brought you to this place?

Victoria Gibbon: Yeah, so for me, I grew up in Winnipeg, Manitoba and I went on to do business, actually, at the University of Manitoba and swiftly realized that was not my path and I moved over to anthropology which I was very passionate about. It took me a little bit of time to decide whether I wanted to work on stones and go more into archeology, or whether I wanted to focus on bones and move into biological anthropology. And then after getting my undergraduate degree, I had an opportunity to do a Master’s degree in South Africa, and I came over to Johannesburg.

And I did my PhD at the University of Witwatersrand and there I did a PhD in archaeogenetics when it was very very new and I developed a new method for molecular sex determination, that was also good for forensic cases. And then after that I did a postdoc in colorectal cancer genetics because that paid the bills. And then I did a few other postdocs and moved around. So, I did a postdoc at Indiana, at Purdue University in bioarcheology, and then eventually I got full-time work at the University of New Brunswick.

And then I came into the position I am now at the University of Cape Town. So, when I was at the University of New Brunswick, was the first time that I was classified as a forensic anthropologist. And there was basically no casework for me to be engaged in. I did very little my services weren’t needed but when I came to the University of Cape there was already an established service provider, the forensic anthropology Cape Town’s forensic lab. And we do casework with the local police and forensic pathology services. And so, it’s really moving to Cape Town where it became a more central focus within my research program.

Yvonne Kjorlien: Because it is…every institution every area every city region is different and whether or not or to what degree they involve I guess academics and in those forensic investigations. And how they involve or if they involve academics in their investigations, isn’t it?

Victoria Gibbon: Absolutely, and also so in New Brunswick there weren’t very many people who are missing and murdered. Whereas — so in Fredericton, where it was a very small number — whereas in Cape Town that number is very large. So, on average we have about 10% of the individuals that come into our mortuaries remain unidentified per annum.

Yvonne Kjorlien: Wow.

Victoria Gibbon:  and the closest mortuary to us at the University of Cape Town has an average intake of around 4 to 5,000 bodies a year. So we’re looking somewhere around two to five hundred people locally who remain unidentified per year and across the country that expands to somewhere between 8 and 10,000 South Africans. So the need is much greater and due to the need it is a direct fuel for research, right? Because where there’s need, research can help fill gaps and maybe improve identification.

Yvonne Kjorlien: Wow, okay. There’s a few things that I want to touch on, but I want to get to Devin first. But yeah, I want to come back to how you’re involved in all that kind of stuff. So, Devin, how did you come to work with Vicky.

What’s your academic path?

Devin Finaughty: So, I grew up in Johannesburg, where I’m now based and when I finished school, I moved to Cape Town to study at the University of Cape Town and I did the whole hog at UCT. So undergrad honors, Master’s, which I then upgraded to PhD under Professor Emeritus Alan Morris, who’s also Canadian. During my Master’s, started to my honors, but then mainly into my Masters and PhD, I had the privilege of being able to work on forensic cases through FACT, the laboratory that for Vicky spoke about, initially as a member and then later as a senior postgrad as a senior member.

And that mainly involved just assisting the senior forensic anthropologists on cases. I hadn’t initially set out to do forensics when I first went to university. I actually wanted to do medicine. I knew about forensics. When I was in high school, I had job shadowed a forensic pathologist at the Hillbrow Mortuary in Johannesburg, which was a very eye-opening experience, as you can imagine. And funnily enough, I was at the mortuary the other day and it hasn’t changed since 2007. It looks the same and it smells the same.

Victoria Gibbon:  Shame.

Yvonne Kjorlien: They probably all have the same smell.

Devin Finaughty: Yeah. Mortuaries in South Africa are something interesting. But I didn’t get into medicine; my maths marks wouldn’t good enough. So, I did a general Bachelor of Science degree instead and it was a lecture by Professor Morris in my second year on forensic anthropology or lecture series — he gave us three lectures — that really caught my attention and I sat back and I thought that is a job I would love to do. And I went up to him after the lecture and I said, “your work is amazing. How do I do this?” And he said, “it’s not all that it’s cracked up to be. What are you studying for?” and I said, “I’m trying to get into medicine,” and he said, “oh, stick to that.”

Yeah, but I was not to be deterred and I discovered that there was an honors program in biological anthropology. Had never heard of biological anthropology before, but through my own research realized that that’s the foundation for forensic anthropology. And so, I set myself and getting in there. I was able to get in and then I just carried on right through to PhD.

For my Master’s upgraded to PhD research, I established the first taphonomic research program in Cape Town. So, it was clear through the work that I was able to participate in that we didn’t have a very good understanding of the decomposition processes in Cape Town.

And Cape Town is a globally unique biogeographic environment. It’s the Cape Floristic Kingdom, which only occurs in that part of the world. There are thousands of unique species of plants and animals and that, together with a very unique geography, means that we can’t take data from anywhere else in the world and apply it to Cape Town. And as Vicky explained, there is a tremendous need for this information. So, I set about establishing those data.

And that was when I met Vicky. So, when Vicky started at UCT, Vicky, I think in 2016?

Victoria Gibbon: Yep.

Devin Finaughty: Vicky came in, Alan retired. Vicky came in and pretty much embraced me, even though she didn’t have to, she very much took me under her wing and looked after me as I finished up my PhD for three years, in fact, and that’s how it started together. We started doing forensic casework together and doing research together. We started off co-supervising an honors student, who’s now got his own PhD. And our research program together is just, has blossomed really.

Yvonne Kjorlien: Wow, fabulous. Can I just say that medicine lost out. Ha!

Devin Finaughty: Ironically, I ended up teaching the medical students anatomy and realized that I actually wouldn’t have wanted to study medicine.

Yvonne Kjorlien: So, you’re happy with your path.

Devin Finaughty: Very much so. I mean, as Vicky said I have now taken a step sideways and moved from human forensics into wildlife forensics, which is something we can talk about later, if you’d like, but I am still involved in human forensic casework through my current position at the University of Witwatersrand as part of the Human Variation and Identification Research Unit.

Yvonne Kjorlien: All boy, that’s just a whole other ball of juiciness right there. All right, so let’s talk a little bit about the work that you’ve done together because I have a smattering of articles on my desk here. Everything from scattering patterns and forensic taphonomy to decomp to vertebrate scavenging. And then there is the forensic realism. So, if you…I don’t know how you two… I’m guessing you’ve probably done presentations together before or group chats before… however you want to tackle that, you go for it because I want to hear it all.

Victoria Gibbon: Yeah, okay, maybe I’ll start there. So, I think one of the things that when I came into this position at the University of Cape Town, Devin was there this work was ongoing and he was with good science and knew science. He was revealing more and more interesting questions that needed to be answered. And students are interested in this work. And like I said earlier, there’s definitely need locally for the information. And so while my passion wasn’t originally to do taphonomic work, I could see the value of the outcome for the city, the country, etc. But also that there were student interest. And there were really interesting questions. And at that point in time, we had a really good facility where we were working. And so, it was quite natural for my research program to shift into that because of this interest. So, my research program even today doesn’t only involve forensics and certainly doesn’t only involve forensic taphonomy. But where we come together is in this forensic taphonomy space, and we had our first student together was Max Spies and he did honors with us and was building on one of the questions that came out of Devin’s research on mongoose and how they play a role in decomposition with the scattering and scavenging.

And that work ended up being very informative for us because we not only started to learn information about the decomposition process, but actually mongoose behavior. And so, when we went to, Devin was called out to a case on Table Mountain and I went with, and while we were there, we could see some tunneling in the fynbos, which suggested that mongoose were there, and both hands and feet of the decedent were missing. The feet were there. The hands were missing.

And this is something we had seen in Max’s project, is that the mongoose target small parts of the body, carry them off, and then eat them or consume them underneath denser vegetation. So that they’re protected while they’re consuming. So, we also knew from Max’s work that the scattering normally took a maximum radius of five meters out from the body (edit: the scatter range is 5-12m). So, we cleared back the vegetation five meters and we recovered all the bones of the hands and the feet plus a watch and some jewelry. So that these are the types of things that actually help with identification, right? Is personal belongings, but also the more we recover of a body, the better the chances we have of identifying the body.

And so that was just our first project that we did together and then that led on to Max pursuing a Master’s which then upgraded into a PhD. And since then also had Kara Adams who’s also now a doctor and she has gone on to expand on the work of both Devin and Max and in new directions. And both Max and Kara are now postdocs with other people at the University of Cape Town and they’re working with us on our current project.

But the shift in our thinking through time shifted to… one of the things that I bring very much to this research is the forensic realism. I’m all about forensic application. Devin’s very interested in innovation and is very focused on the minutiae of how these things work. And so I’ve been really focused on asking these questions about realism and he’s really interested in innovation. And so a few years ago he said to me — I don’t know I think — Devin was like, “wouldn’t it be cool if we could do this totally automated and we didn’t need to go to site every day?” and I was like,

Yvonne Kjorlien: Oh yeah!

Victoria Gibbon: “that would be amazing,” because Max went to site every single day. And so did Devin and weighted the pigs every day with a manual block and tackle. And so we approached electrical engineering, I approached the Head of Department there and I said, “we have this idea. Do you think this is possible?” and they ran it as an honors sort of competition. And the students knew the problem and then had to come up with solutions to create an autonomous weighing rig. And then the electrical engineer took the designs the students came up with and then used them to create their own design, which led to our first design. Devin was very instrumental in the creation of that design. And we worked with the electrical engineer, Max, myself, and also Charles Harris (Principal Technical Officer: Department of Human Biology, University of Cape Town), who helped actually build the rig itself.

And so innovation, forensic realism, have become bigger paths within our very targeted research focus. So while our questions that we ask in the students research are very much focused on helping casework, we are also driving and innovating an entire new approach to taphonomic research, and I think that’s where, is an area I’m very interested in and I think at some of our biggest impact is actually happening in that broader space and I think, Devin  maybe you could add on to that about the forensic realism and the innovation and how we’re changing things nationally, internationally.

Devin Finaughty: Absolutely. So apart from just improving our own experience of field work and making it more efficient and more cost-effective, which is what automation can do, I mean that the reason I went to Vicky at this idea is that Max and I collecting data, whether it’s hailing or it’s 45 degrees (Celcius) in the shade. So if we…I was like, machines do everything for us now, surely we could get a machine to do this too, at least some aspects of it.

But the other major advantage of moving towards that automation was this is two things. The one is the ability to quantify a lot more of the data that we’re getting. I mean, historically, decomposition has been conceived of in qualitative terms. I mean, if you think of the total body scoring system, for example, even though it’s a score, it is still fundamentally based on a qualitative, subjective observation and we can create all the core definitions that we want about the specific color or the specific thing. The reality is even fundamentally our perception of color is different. It changes based on the light that’s striking the body that you’re looking at. It doesn’t really work in experimental circumstances with clothed bodies because you would then have to open the clothes every day to see what was happening underneath which has a disturbance effect that you can’t quantify unless you have another one that you’re not opening, but then you can’t use the system to monitor that.

So, we were running into these challenges. And then that’s obviously set up against the broader drive to quantification that the Daubert standards brought in, really, for forensic anthropology globally. We don’t have formal rigorous standards in South Africa, but we still hold those as the gold standard, so to speak, and we work towards that. You need that explanatory power. You need to be able to say…you need to be able to tell the courts the likelihood that you’re wrong, more than anything else. And the more quantitative data you have, the best for your chances are going to be able to figure that out and to be able to justify it in a meaningful way.

So, by moving towards automation, we can figure out ways to evaluate decomposition through properly quantitative means, rather than pseudo quantitative means. That’s the one aspect. The other aspect, and this comes back to experimental design and model building, is the ability to collect data from multiple bodies simultaneously. So, we want to build up this model of decomposition. We obviously need lots of instances of decomposition in the given area by geographic area to understand all the nuances in that because every single decomposition sequence is unique, as I’m sure you very well aware and a lot of our listeners are probably aware.

Yvonne Kjorlien: Oh yeah.

Devin Finaughty: So, to capture that variation you need lots of measures. But if we’re manually collecting data, you go to one body, you collect the data, you go to the next body, you collect the data from that. In most circumstances, most researchers don’t have huge teams of students to go and do all of that simultaneously. And so, if you’ve got lots of bodies, because you’ve got lots of replicates, your data collection time could be several hours. And the reality of decomposition is that the biotic agents of decomposition are going to change their activity within their time slot, right? Because the temperature is changing; the weather is changing. And those fine-scale changes on the ground on a daily basis might not seem like much, but add them together, cumulatively over weeks or months of a decomposition sequence, and they can have really, really meaningful changes in the trajectory and rates of decomposition.

So, if you automate things you can now collect all the data simultaneously, so they are truly comparative and your model is going to be that much more accurate for it. The other thing is you can reduce the disturbance factor, right? If we’re going to site every single day, and we’re chasing away scavengers, we’re disturbing the insects, we are changing vegetation. There are a range of things and there’s some research from Australia from the mid-2000s that demonstrates that disturbance of bodies during the decomposition process does change the rate of decomposition. It doesn’t change it significantly when you pool it all together, but at the individual body level, it can change it significantly.

And back to Vicky’s point of forensic realism, we are actually interested in the individual body, Yes, we’ve got to understand broad patterns across lots of bodies over time, but most of our forensic cases are single clothed bodies at least in our local context in Cape Town. And that’s what we need to be working back towards.

The automation gives a series of tools that help to improve the experimental design and achieve things that the discipline’s been trying to achieve for a long time. We wrote about this quite extensively in the two papers we published on this, which, if the listeners want to go read to understand the argument more holistically, they’re more than welcome to because they’re both open access.  

But there’ve been these fundamental challenges in the nature of data collection dating back to the 80s, which we’re still grappling with. And we feel and we hope that this approach, it might not solve those problems entirely, but it could at least get us a step closer towards addressing those and improving the quality of data, that we, as forensic taphonomists, are generating.

And that’s part of the reason we’re putting it out there. It’s also the reason we didn’t patent the system or anything. This is something that needs to be built up and innovated according to individual research groups’ needs because decomposition is such a big and such a complex process, one research group couldn’t possibly hope, in an entire academic lifetime, to capture even a fraction of what’s actually happening. So, we need lots of people working on all the different aspects. But if we then want to combine all of that knowledge and hope to build this really comprehensive picture of decomposition across varied biogeoclimatic circumstances, we need all be collecting data in the same way so that the data are comparable and we’re not doing that at the moment. And this keeps coming out in the literature. It’s been coming out in the literature since the 1980s. And so we’re hoping that this autonomous system, far from being prescriptive, is simply a tool, a framework to capture data in a standardized way that will help us answer the more fundamental questions, particularly around forensic realism.

And I’ll hand back over to Vicky to talk more about that.

Victoria Gibbon: I just wanted to add to what Devin was saying there and I think the critical aspect is it’s not about replicating what we as scientists have for years done in labs and in the field, but actually replicate what we’re seeing in real casework.

Devin Finaughty: exactly

Victoria Gibbon: So having our research driven by case work examples. And if I may, Yvonne, I’m cutting here a little bit. I wonder if I could just go back sort of to the beginning because one of the things I think I didn’t say in the beginning is how my role within the police, etc., which because of that role has led me to focus more on what is happening in casework and then have a research approach. So do you mind if I…

Yvonne Kjorlien: Absolutely, and that was actually, when I said, we’ll get back to that later, that was one of the things I wanted to get back to, so this is perfect.

Victoria Gibbon: So, I’m leading a research group. We call ourselves the Western Cape Cold Case Consortium. And we have built ourselves up. We’re a team of researchers involved in forensic practice in a variety of ways. So, we’ve got members of the team who are in forensic pathology services. We have a forensic geneticist, a forensic isotope analysist, a forensic anthropologist, which is me, and then we have a facial reconstruction expert, who specializes in forensic facial reconstruction. Now we’re all in the Western Cape and we have taken our different roles into this new approach and actually this started with a project that…by Athi Baliso, who’s a new lecturer in our department, and she did her Master’s on a survey of forensic anthropology casework in the Western Cape. And as part of that, she isolated different types of patterns that we see in our local cases. So, terrestrial cases, which are the cases that we find on land, what kinds of patterns do we see most common in the Western Cape? So, when we are driving replication studies, what’s the most common and most impactful replication we can do in order to drive our research. And then similarly with aquatic cases in the same way because we are a coastal city. We do get a lot of wash-up cases, and wash up cases are very difficult to identify for a variety of other reasons.

So, the Western Cape Cold Case Consortium, we are trying to look at ways, what are the patterns and ways that research can effectively improve the application of forensic science across a case in order to see if we can get identification rate improvement. And the main thing is, for years we’ve been really driven by quantitative approaches, like Devin said now about Daubert, etc., so a lot of people have set up experiments where they have multiple bodies out at a time. They’re in close proximity to each other. We even have human decomposition body farms where bodies are literally stacked up. But in reality, we do not see that, we don’t see that in case work. We see single cases as the most common in a terrestrial or on land environment. We see clothed individuals. We see them on the surface. We don’t see them buried and this is in our environment. So, we then now try to replicate those circumstances and we are very careful about an area of research, that Devin introduced me to, is carrion biomass and load in the environment. And this is something that leads to this concept of what people refer to as scavenger swamping. So, when we have… one of the things that we realized through one of our students projects, is that the mongoose are a massive impactful, they play a massive impactful role in decomposition and accelerating the decomposition process locally. The question is, originally, like everyone else in the world, we had four (multiple) bodies out at a time and in fairly close proximity to each other. But as we started to shift our thinking, we said, “what happens if we just put out one body?” And what we found was that it was accelerated… I can’t remember exactly how much, but it was like 10-fold. Devin, do you remember?

Devin Finaughty: 419 percent increase in the rate of scavenging.

Yvonne Kjorlien: Wow, okay. So just hang on put a pause in this — how close were you depositing them before and how close, because I’m guessing you’re not just putting out one season. You’re probably putting them out multiples, but at greater distances. So, if you could shed some light on that for me.

Victoria Gibbon: Devin, go ahead.

Devin Finaughty: So, we were initially running four bodies per season. So, we were looking at two different habitats and the same vegetation zone. So, Cape Flats Dune Strandveld, which covers most of Cape Town, and it’s the most of what is intact left, at least that hasn’t been destroyed by urbanization.

And then we have invasive alien trees called Port Jackson and Rooikrans — Acacia saligna and Acacia cyclops — which form these really dense thickets that people love to hide bodies in because they’re really dense thickets. So, we were looking at those two habitats and we had two pigs in each habitat per season running multiple seasons in…to look at annual effects as well. The pigs were around 30 to 40 meters apart. So, not the minimum of 50 meters.

Yvonne Kjorlien: Okay, that is quite close.

Devin Finaughty: Yes, it’s not the minimum of 50 meters that Matuszewski and colleagues have subsequent the advocated to stop the overlap. But that, as Vicky said, we’re now looking at much further, at minimum 50 meters apart, but still within the same broad habitat so that we’re not falling foul of simple pseudoreplication (an important, underexplored concept in forensic taphonomic experimental design detailed by Schoenly, Michaud & Moreau 2015; DOI: https://doi.org/10.1201/b18819).

Yvonne Kjorlien: All right. So, before it was within 50 meters now, you’re definitely outside of that 50 meters.

Victoria Gibbon: Yes.

Yvonne Kjorlien: Got it, okay.

Victoria Gibbon: And so, when we did this experiment where we just put one pig down, we noticed this huge increase in accelerated decomp rate but then that means all the other data we had from years before was really not very useful because that’s not what we see in reality and so it started making us think really differently about what we were doing on the ground. And also feeling very critical about what’s coming out in the international literature because scavenger swamping is the idea where you have too many bodies out and scavengers actually are, by their nature, opportunistic feeders. So, you get the pulse, the carrion pulse comes into the environment and they monopolize on it. But when all the sudden there’s lots of carrion pulses, which is really unnatural, then their behavior becomes unnatural and then what we found is they would end up feeding on which, the heaviest fed-on carcass ended up being the one closest to trees or areas where they could feed in a way that protected them from birds and their own predation. So, we started to think a little bit more about our own structure and design and how we can change that and the mindset internationally and we are making big changes locally on forensic realism and having casework drive research, rather than research drive casework, or try and do the opposite, which doesn’t work. What we’re seeing is that we’re not being very effective and we’re actually struggling to get the message out internationally. There is a huge resistance to this approach.

Yvonne Kjorlien: Welcome to my world.

Victoria Gibbon: So we still battle on and sometimes we struggle to get our papers accepted because then people will turn around and but you only have data from one or two pigs at a time but when you use this approach, it means you have to do many, many years of data collection before you build up a data set, but it doesn’t mean the baseline data we’re producing isn’t more accurate than what we had before.

Devin Finaughty: Or valid.

Victoria Gibbon: Or valid. Yeah.

Yvonne Kjorlien: Exactly. Yes. It’s music to my ears. Let me just say there’s some times… I feel like many, many years. I feel like I’ve been screaming into the void and just crickets. Nobody sees the value of it. So, to have people like you come along and doing this work. I’m feeling pretty vindicated at the moment actually.

Victoria Gibbon: Good. We’re making a difference for one.

Yvonne Kjorlien: But you’re right this is several researchers’ lifetimes worth of work. The variables are just so complex, there are so many of them. We have to dig to figure out what they are and then to try to figure out how they’re integrated, how they interplay with each other because we’re working in naturalistic, very real situations.

I came across a student poster once — and apologies if you are listening, but this is an example — that the poster was an experiment that she had done. She used remains that had already been embalmed and then she put them out to how they would decompose and I’m like, how is this real? What’s the likelihood that investigators would be called upon a scene to find embalmed remains.

Victoria Gibbon: Never. Never in a way that’s actually forensically interesting because an embalmed body, like the application would be very minimal, if at all.

Yvonne Kjorlien: I know what you’re saying about, using the case studies to direct what and how you’re doing the research, that makes complete sense.

Victoria Gibbon: Yeah, absolutely.

Devin Finaughty: If I could add to that. So, I mean this is the approach…like what we’re describing isn’t brand new to toponomy. When Dr. Bill Bass started the Tennessee facility back in the 80s, this was the approach that they used for the first 10 years. They were replicating what they were seeing in casework. But then as we grew in our knowledge of all the variables that were at play, we sort of started to focus in on those and temperature, is, as we’ve seen in the literature, has been the overwhelming focus.

But that made the research very reductionist and my sense is that, for the last at least two decades, we’ve had a very hyper-focused, very reductionist approach to the research, which has led us to ignore a lot of the other factors that are at play. This is what we were starting to see in our own research, as Vicky described. We’re saying, actually, most people are excluding scavengers because they’re interested in the insects or they’re interested in some else. “We’re trying to get the baseline decomposition and then we’ll add in all the variables”. But the reality is that the baseline that really matters is the forensic case. That’s the baseline once we know what happens there, then we can start to go into the minutiae and break it down. We can’t hope to build it up to the complexity of a forensic case, as you rightly pointed out. We’re dealing with biology. Biology is complex and messy. We’re probably never going to be able to realistically, accurately, mathematically describe it, at least not with the current tools and technology that we have. We might get there one day. But we can get approximations that can still be useful forensically. And in our context in South Africa, any information is useful. Even if it doesn’t make it to court, if it just helps guide the investigation, that is worth having. And that’s our goal. Part of the pursuit of the forensic realism, other than just trying to replicate what we’re seeing in casework, is also having a much bigger focus on the ecology.

So, my undergrad is in human physiology and zoology and I’m a closet conservationist, though very much coming out to the closet in that regard now. So, I’m also very, as Vicky said, I’m very interested in the innovation side of things. I’m also very interested in the ecology of what’s happening. And a lot of what Vicky is described with our building this knowledge on the mongoose, that’s core ecological research. And we’ve uncovered a lot of information about this particular species’ biology and its life history patterns, that were actually not known to science because they’ve never been studied in this context. They’ve been studied in nature reserves, where you don’t have frequent anthropogenic pulses of food. And that’s what we knew. Now you bring it into a city site — we’re looking at the sort of peri-urban and we still kind of are looking at peri-urban — but in the urban settings, we hadn’t seen — at least in the leafy suburbs, we hadn’t seen mongoose — but certainly on the fringes, in a city like Cape Town, which is surrounded on many sides by large natural reserves, these animals are coming into our space because we’re encroaching into theirs. And that’s true of many urban areas, even in Johannesburg, which is a city bigger than London with a bigger population. They’ve seen, in the middle of the CBD (Central Business District), they’ve seen scavenging by two species of mongoose, amongst other things. So these animals are coming in. You can’t be excluding them. It’s much better to just say, “Let’s look at what’s happening in forensic cases. Put bodies down and just see what happens and then we can build from there.” That should be our baseline. And that I think is really that’s one of the core impetuses of what we’re trying to do is to bring it back to that realism.

Otherwise, it’s not going to be as useful and as impactful as it should be and could be.

Victoria Gibbon: Yeah, one thing I just want to add to that is I remember one of the projects we were working on we had nude pigs. Unclothed. And I remember saying, “but we never find nude bodies. They’re so rare. So why are we doing this?” And then we started doing the clothed project and we actually compared the data on clothing and unclothing, but also clothing changes the ecology, right? Because it changes where insects go, how insects can access, how scavengers can access, it changes their behavior, it changes then the decomposition across the body.

And so, then Alan Morris, at that time he was retired, and I remember he said but the clothes have to fit the pigs like they fit people. And so, then we had to get a seamstress, and we did an entire review of the clothing types that we get in cases, the most common things that we see. Cotton t-shirts. We don’t see a lot of polyesters. So, what are the most common things? So, we have an entire clothing set-up that is based on a review of casework. Then we go and buy our clothing in on the same day for all of the experiments, across all the seasons, and we buy it from the most common everyday person store in South Africa. So, we buy from Ackermans or Pep, and so that we are replicating accurately what people would wear and everyday clothes, and then we take them to the seamstress, and we’ve created a pattern, took measurements of the pigs, and where they change a lot is in the pants. So, the way the bum fits in the pants and the tapered little legs, but even in our winter one, so when we do a winter season, we’ve got winter clothes. So, they’ve got a sweater on, a t-shirt on, a belt, they’ve got jeans or denims and then they have little baby socks and baby shoes on. And in summer we were going to put flip-flops. We realized that’s kind of counterintuitive because they just fall off, so we don’t put anything on the feet and summer. And in summer, they also have on denims or jeans and then they just have a cotton t-shirt. And they wear underwear. We get them nice new fresh underwear and everything. And then on the day, because of the way the pants fit on the body, we actually sew up the seat of the pants on the pig on the day.

And so, we sew them right up the back end. And so, then they are tailored perfectly to the body just like our clothes are tailored to us, which prevent a barrier for animals, for example, to scurry at the leg and get in.  And so those tapered pants that fit them like they do us is important. Now these kinds of nuances in our research, I think sometimes get lost in the publications, but I think we should talk about them. So, I just wanted to raise that we do actually have seamstresses that, over many years now, who have helped us prepare clothes for pigs.

And also, the other thing I wanted to talk about here is the fact that we talk about forensic realism, but then we use pigs, which, of course, aren’t real. What we set out to do, and in South Africa at the moment, it’s not legal to use donor human bodies in this kind of research outdoors. Look, and we are looking at trying to move in that direction. But I also have a fundamental block on the realism of donor bodies in general because who donates their body to science do not match the people who end up being in forensic cases. They don’t match in age. They don’t necessary match in gender, and they most importantly do not match in health. So, the majority…and we know that that affects the ecology, because animals that are sickly, other animals don’t want to eat sick animals. So, if we use donor bodies and the person is elderly and has maybe even been on medicines and all of that, those bodies — and this speaks to what was said earlier — that they emanate smells, like embalmed bodies, that are very different than what is natural. And the majority of people who end up in forensic investigations in South Africa tend to be younger men. And they don’t tend to be elderly, sickly people. They tend to be typically physically healthy young men. And so, using donor bodies, I’m not sure is a perfect analog, either way.

So, I’m not saying that pigs are a good analog or the best analog, but I don’t think having a donor farm in South Africa would replace pig research. I think we need to be able to control how the animal died. Being able to control all the circumstances around the death and the termination to make them as forensically accurate as possible. And not have to worry about all these other influences that people really aren’t controlling for in human donor body farms.

Yvonne Kjorlien: Yeah, I think that what Devin said before about the approximation, we’re approaching, and we may spend lifetimes approaching and it may just be an approach.

Victoria Gibbon: Absolutely.

Yvonne Kjorlien: We’re just you continually refining an approximate, and if that’s as good as we get, then that’s as good as we get. But I think you bring up a valuable point that there are so many variables that either we’re taking for granted, we’re overlooking or we’re not accounting for.

Victoria Gibbon: Exactly.

Yvonne Kjorlien: Yeah.

Victoria Gibbon: Absolutely, and then the other part of it is, when I started this work and recently we were kind of called out on this, in my mind, my big sales pitch was time since death, right? So, we’re helping improve time since death (estimates). But actually, over the years, I think that it’s not really about time since death. It’s really about the nuances of how bodies decompose and it’s those nuances that actually are more informative on the forensic lead. So, it’s not actually about the exact time since death. And now I’m no longer using that as my sales pitch. It’s about helping the police investigation on the ground, get started, and that time with that case where we had seen something with the mongoose and then we can apply it in a real case that improves our ability to recover the body fully. And also, I [end] up recovering personal belongings, which are quite diagnostic for individualization. So, it’s about the forensic leads, and it’s about these nuances that help us help the police get their forensic leads and run their investigation, which ultimately lead towards identification.

So, I used to think that forensic anthropology is really about us helping to identify the person. And over the years, I’ve realized, no, my role is to serve the police in improving investigative leads and to help with their investigative process. And so, with W4C, or the Western Cape Cold Case Consortium, that’s our drive. We are trying to, through forensic science, improve forensic outcomes for, not just the police and forensic pathology services, but for the decedent, their families, and the loved ones who have no closure. And so, how can we improve closure? Through science. And how can we facilitate that? But meanwhile still be doing interesting, exciting, innovative science as scientists.

So, it’s the twofold, where we’re at now.

Yvonne Kjorlien: Nice. Devin, I’m gonna hand this back to you.

Devin Finaughty: That was a very mic-drop-moment from Vicky. I’m not sure how I can add to that. So eloquent! And maybe I can sort of just hone-in on some really specific examples…

Yvonne Kjorlien: Sure, yes.

Devin Finaughty… that really illustrate what Vicky was saying. So, if we go back to the case that Vicky mentioned before, about the case that we did on Table Mountain, where we were… we didn’t have to recover the decedent’s hands or the jewelry or the watch. In that case, the police really had a pretty good idea of who the decedent was and we often say it’d be really helpful if people died with their identity documents. And in this case, that was (the case); the person had their wallet, their driver’s license, IDs, passports, everything. So that wasn’t the question. And this speaks to Vicky point, which is our role there wasn’t to facilitate identification. The police, I mean the remains were skeletonized, so we had to do an osteobiographical profile because the decedent could have those items associated, but they’re not primary identifiers, so you still have to do that. But in that case, I think our role much more fundamentally was giving the whole of the decedent back to their family. So, bringing them together as a person, making them whole, and then giving them back to their family.

I spent five years working in the UK just before returning to South Africa. I worked at the University of Kent. And one of my colleagues was in the London Metropolitan Police for 30 years. And we spoke about lots of cases that they worked on. And in the UK, red kites are prominent scavengers of remains, especially in rural areas. And they carry pieces of the body off and they never recover them. And my colleague said to me a lot of families are really upset by that. Even if the finger missing, and even if… There are some families where there are cultural rights that cannot be concluded because the body is not whole, but even if that’s not the case, you still want all of your loved one.

And, the work we’re doing, looking at the mongoose in our context, and very much the work you’re doing in Canada, looking at the scattering patterns there. There’s so much important work within that, that isn’t related to identity, but is just about the ethics of the work that we do and restoring dignity in death, both to the decedent and giving complete closure to the families. And that really needs to be – and should be – one prominent things that underpins our work. And we very much have that close at heart.

Yvonne Kjorlien: Thank you for that because, Vicky, I love that you have refocused not on the identification, and more on the outcomes and being of service to the investigators and their outcomes, and also the ethical issues of closure and giving that back to the families. The reason that I’ve kind of framed our work in terms of the identification and increased recovery of the amount of remains so that closure may be possible, etc., is because just that it’s almost like the families need to drive the ethics of having closure and getting their loved ones back as complete as possible, because the investigators are that middle piece in there, where as long as they can get the identification and get the evidence they need for the case, that’s good for them. But what’s good for them, may not be good enough for the family. And so even as us on the other side where we’re in service to both the investigators and the families, even though we want to eventually appease the families and their desire for closure, we have that the investigators in between, they’re saying, “You know what? I just need an identification and enough evidence to serve my case.” So how do you negotiate that?

Victoria Gibbon: So, this is a trickier space and I think and in the South African environment, probably quite different, Yvonne, than what you experience in Canada, just because of mass. So, for example, with 300 people being unidentified in our local mortuary per year, the police have far less capacity to actually give each case the same amount of energy that it actually needs or desires. And that’s not because they don’t want to do it. It’s because there’s just no more hours in the day and …

Yvonne Kjorlien: It’s capacity.

Victoria Gibbon: it is absolutely capacity. And so, anything that we can do to help them in their casework, they will run with it, but it doesn’t mean that there isn’t a role. And actually, with W4C currently, we have done these five cold cases and we’ve put a lot of science into them and we are struggling to get them identified with the police. We have big campaigns and we’re doing everything we can. But one of the things that’s coming up is we had what we thought was a probable ID and it turns out that it wasn’t the right person. And that has created this new engagement with this family around giving them hope that this could be their missing loved one for years, and then having to go back to them, after creating hope and saying, “I’m sorry, but this isn’t yours.” But then having to… it opened the door for them to communicate to us what it’s like to be on the family side. And to just be totally unaware of where your loved one is and how desolate that can feel for them. And they are now saying to us, “How can we help you identify these people and us, and help you and you help us?”

And so one of the things that this family has said is, “I’m going to do a radio interview and I’m going to talk about my experience and we’re gonna talk about what options are available out there because, while this didn’t lead to my loved one being this person, it’s someone’s loved one”. And so, there’s so much empathy and power actually for these en masse in South Africa, which I think is untapped for these families to actually move together and to push for changes in legislation.

So currently in South Africa forensic science is not forced in any case. It’s not legislated. It’s at the discretion of the pathologist if they want a forensic scientist involved. That could change. Now, if government mandated forensic science to be involved in every single case…so the forensic pathologist always does their role like that is part of their mandate but additional forensic scientific methods are not mandated. So if they were mandated in legislation, we instantly create jobs, when you have jobs, you have people, people with forensic scientists who can pick up that capacity that the current investigation in South Africa can’t carry.

And so now we’ve started to talk about, and even in W4C, we started to try to figure out what are our gaps in identification locally, and what are challenges. And the number one thing that came up — sorry Yvonne, this is kind of taking us in a different direction — but the number one thing that I went into the project thinking was that my science was going to bring a solution. And when we started talking to people on the ground, the number one thing that the people involved — the police, the pathologists — they said there’s a disconnect between the missing person’s form that people fill out at the police station and the unidentified body form that’s filled out at the mortuary. So, these two forms do not speak to each other and therefore their ability to match. And so, then I started looking into these forms. And I originally went provincially and the head of detectives was like, “you’re never going to change the national forms, like forget it.” And I just got the hell in and started making some calls to people I knew in the police and I said, “I need to know who I can contact here,” And sure enough I was able to get a phone number for somebody who’s in the national detectives. And when I called him, explained who I was — and my friend who’s a cop told me all the things not to say and what to say — and so I opened with who I am, and I said, “I was wondering if I could help partner, and help the police improve their missing persons form.” And he was first was like, “no, our forms are fine.” And then I pointed out some really problematic aspects on the form, which I’m not going to repeat here on the podcast. But he was like, “no, it doesn’t say that.” I said, “it does say that. Just pull it up.” And then he was like, “Uh oh.”

And the form, I just found out this week, has been rolled out for pilot in two provinces. So, we’ve totally revised these two forms and they now speak to each other. They are all PDF driven. They’re form-fillable. They’re very transformative, and I’m hoping they get through. And if they get through, they will be the first police missing forms internationally that have non-binary as an option and the…how do we improve… and so then the next step for me is to go back to my electrical engineering friends and say, “can we run an honors project on how to make these PDF forms into [an] app for the police?” And then the data is filled in real time and not having a 30-day delay to be manually filled out and manually entered. And the forms were 12 pages long and now are only seven pages. So, the ability for someone who’s grief-stricken to fill out a missing person’s form is also reduced for both the police officer and for the family member.

And so sometimes, I guess one of the things I just want to say here, is that while we do think our science is informative and I do believe the science we do is good. Sometimes asking people on the ground what would be the biggest difference in improving identification rate? They have solutions that actually, like in this case, it was just an administrative aspect of reworking a form, that in few years, I’m hoping we will actually see an improvement in the matches between missing persons and unidentified bodies in South Africa. And it’s probably going to be the most impactful thing I ever do in my career…

Yvonne Kjorlien: It’ll be completely unresearch-related.

Victoria Gibbon: Exactly! It’s like basically. I was a secretary for the police. I redid their form. So, I do think that these nuances and our impact, we need to be thinking about our power and privilege within the research space, within the university space, to make and affect a real change on the ground. And that’s by having conversations with people on the ground, the police, the pathologist, and the families.

Yvonne Kjorlien: Absolutely. Wow. And, you know what? Yeah, I agree. That’s probably gonna be the most impactful thing that you will be remembered for, and you will ever do; however, yes, it was because of your research the position that you hold and your network that you were able to do that. right and no.

Victoria Gibbon: Yeah, I also think that I’ll never really like I brought it up here, but it’s not the kind of thing you can publish, right? So, it also not something I’ll really be known for, it’s just something I’ll know I did myself. I told you two. Up and…I can’t say I did it all myself. There was a three of us who worked on it together, but it’s interesting.

Yvonne Kjorlien: I’m conscious of the time so, Devin, I’m gonna give it back to you because I think future directions is kind of where you’re at right now with your little switch into wildlife taphonomy. So, if you want to talk a little bit about that and where you kind of see that taking you in the next, maybe five to ten years.

Devin Finaughty: Sure. So, the first thing I want to say is to 100% agree with what Vicky’s just said. My wife and I just met with someone here, we’re up in the Waterberg, in northern South Africa at the moment. And we met with someone who represents one of the local security clusters. And it was just a meet and greet. The take-home message from that conversation – we wanted to know about what is poaching like up here and that – and the take home message was… my wife and I want to want to help, right? We want to take the knowledge and skill and experience that we have in human forensics and apply to the wildlife forensic space. Because a lot of what we do — the forensic taphonomy, the forensic entomology — my wife as a forensic geneticist that specializes in degraded DNA — that isn’t being used in a wildlife forensic space and we feel like there’s something that we could add there. We’re not coming in to tell people what they’re doing wrong at all. We’re just trying to find out how we can help them improve investigative outcomes.

Because, I mean, you’ve heard from our conversation that the missing persons problem that we’ve got is up to 10,000 people a year, which is a catastrophe. And we’ve got a similar problem in wildlife forensics. Although the problem there is very, very poor prosecution rate. So, the National Prosecuting Authority in South Africa is very proud of the fact that they’ve got a 96% prosecution rate, and they should absolutely be proud of that. It’s fantastic. But less than 10% of the cases that are actually brought to the prosecutor make it to trial. And it’s mainly for want of evidence.

So, we have this conversation today basically saying we’re here to help, and the take home message from that is: relationship building. We need to go out. We need a build relationships with all the stakeholders, with the community members, with the local police, with the local farm owners, all of that. We’re not going to be able to do anything if we don’t do that. And I think that really underscores what Vicky had said, which is, regardless of what forensics you’re doing, especially when you’re operating — we’re “pracacademics”, right? We’re doing practical work, but we’re also doing the research. But both of those things ultimately need to serve the stakeholders, at the end of the day. And there are two ways of dealing with the stakeholders. There’s the top-down way of saying we’re the knights in shining armor coming to solve all your problems, this is what we’re going to do, versus we see you’re struggling, you need help. We’re here to help. How can help? And it’s a subtle but very important change of approach that we’re seeing same in the wildlife forensic side.

So, where I’m going now is I’m not leaving taphonomy or the entomology that I do — so I do the forensic taphonomy and entomology together because they go hand in hand together — but as I said, I’m trying to bring that into the wildlife forensic space. I’m also trying to understand very much — what Vicky has just been doing where she’s trying to get to the bottom of what are some of the root causes for the lack of human identification — I’m trying to get to the bottom of why are so few cases actually making it to the prosecutor’s office.

There’s lots of anecdotal information about: oh, that’s a lack of evidence, the police are not collecting things on scene for variety of reasons, I mean straight back to the resourcing point that Vicky brought up. There’s a small team, we learned today that there’s a small team of people to cover an entire province. Poaching scenes can be four to five hundred kilometers apart. The team simply cannot travel all of those distances to multiple scenes and hope to collect evidence. And then there’s quite a good intelligence community here looking at, if an event happens, they can often track the gang that’s perpetrated and say, ”Let’s go and grab them,” then they go and arrest them but then they can’t tie them back to the scene because they never took the time to process the scene. So, they’re held for 48 hours and then they’re released, and the cycle perpetuates. So there needs to be some capacity-building. But how do you… that capacity building is gonna have to come on policy side, right? The state has to devote more resources. Straight back to what Vicky said. You can’t motivate for that policy if you don’t have data. You can bring all the anecdotal information to parliament that you want. They’re just going to shrug their shoulders and say, “that’s what they say.” I’m very keen to establish some hard data on the efficacy of our current forensic practice; I can’t for the entire country, because South Africa is a big country and the nature of wildlife crime is very different depending on what province you’re in. The Western Cape, where Vicky is, doesn’t have a major problem with poaching of, say, rhinos and elephants because they’re very few there, but it’s got a huge problem with marine poaching, particularly of abalone and of succulent poaching. That’s completely different and I need an entire lifetime to do all of those different things, or multiple lifetimes I should say. So, I’m interested in doing it for Bushveld and Lowveld areas of South Africa. Just understanding what’s happening in these areas. And then hopefully bringing some more tools to the table.

So, I’m quite interested in bringing forensic entomology into the space, partly to add additional lines of evidence. So, much like the human cases that Vicky has mentioned, where time since death/post-mortem interval isn’t a major query much of the time, but if you can have that, you can use that to help to link people to scenes, that’s useful. And forensic entomology is, to this day, still the most accurate way of estimating time since death, regardless of what’s died. It just is. But I can’t take the protocols for collecting entomological evidence that we use for human scenes and hope to apply them to wildlife crime scenes because it’s a totally different context. We’re talking about rangers potentially trekking 20, 30 kilometers on foot.

Now they’ve got to sample insects at the scene and bring them back. How do they bring them back alive, number one, and two, in temperature control conditions where I don’t have them carrying — even five extra kilograms of weight over 30 kilometers is a lot because that could be five liters of water for them when it’s 40 degrees Celsius. But you can’t figure any of this out if you’re not going to the scene. So very much like what I was doing with forensic entomology human cases, where I was going to scenes with forensic pathologists at their invitation, or their officers, and just seeing what was happening and trying to figure out — how can I optimize the existing protocols for your circumstance? Our forensic pathologists in South Africa, for example, can’t take boiling water or ethanol to scenes; they’re not allowed to. So you gotta come up with a different way of, you can’t preserve the insects on the scene. You have to bring them back to mortuary, but then you’ve got to account for growth and all sorts of things. So we have to tailor it. That’s one of the aspects that I’m doing is developing and optimizing those protocols for rangers.

The other reason I’m doing it is because one of the primary sources of mass mortality poaching in South Africa is the use of poisoning. So, using things like cyanide or glycophosphate. And water holes get poisoned, so, herds of animals -anything – that comes to drink from that waterhole dies. And then a much more worrying recent trend, particularly in the Lowveld area of South Africa is that poaching gangs are poisoning the carcasses of animals that they’ve killed. So, they kill a rhino, they de-horn it, and then they poison that carcass because the vultures that come to feed in the carcass are a beacon to the security operatives to say, there’s a case there, a potential case, and they make a beeline. And obviously the poachers want as much time as they can get to get away from the scene. So, they’re just poisoning the carcasses to kill the vultures to remove that beacon. And some of our vulture species in South Africa, just in the last five years, have gone from vulnerable to critically endangered as a result of this practice. And the Environmental Management Inspectorate is really struggling to get on top of this because the post-mortem samples that they’re taking from the carcasses, they’re not able to identify what the toxins are in many cases, and even if they are, they have no idea what the concentration is. So, when I said to them, “but have you sampled the maggots that are feeding on the body?” Because then you are [looking at] volatile organic compounds that are being amplified by the same process and you’re just looking at that and they said, “oh no, can you do that?” I said, “yes, here’s the literature that says you can do this.” “Oh, we’d love to do that!” “Great. You need the protocols first.” So that’s another reason to develop those protocols.

And then we also just need baseline developmental data for the forensically relevant species that we’re dealing with, because we have very limited coverage for the northern part of South Africa. The last concerted forensic entomological work that took place north of Pretoria was in the 80s and climate change is real. And we know the developmental biology of insects, which are poikilothermic ecototherms, is very intrinsically linked to temperature. We’ve seen this in one of the species that’s invasive to South Africa, [Calliphora vicina] that comes from the northern hemisphere. In the 70s and 80s, there were a handful of records. Now, they are the dominant species on human forensic cases and wildlife forensic cases in the cooler months of the year South Africa, the dominant species.

But that species wasn’t around 20 years ago in the numbers that it is now. So, we’ve got these species that we could potentially use, but the whole basis of forensic entomology is you need to understand their developmental timelines. So, you need the data for that. So, I plan to sample those species from their locales and do prospective laboratory experimentation to update the developmental standards for a selection of species. I can’t do them all. Far too many. And again, I have a… my contract is for two years, not 10 years. We’ll see what we can do in the two years. But that’s really what I’m doing at least for the next two years, and the hope is that that will continue to grow into continued work in the wildlife forensic space. And hopefully bring to bear some improved outcomes, much the same as Vicky is trying to do with W4C.

Yvonne Kjorlien: I am feeling so honored and privileged to share airtime with you, both of you at the moment. You are doing such amazing work. You’re both so passionate and you’re asking some fundamental questions about the root of why things are happening the way they’re happening and how to change that. And I am beyond honored to share the space with you. Thank you for coming on the podcast. Wow.

Vicky, future directions for you?

Victoria Gibbon: Yeah, so with forensic taphonomy, Devin and I currently have a new project. We’ve deployed some pigs about six weeks ago, and it’s the first time we’ve deployed on Table Mountain, which is the second most common bioecoclimatic zone we find bodies. And the majority of the bodies that come on Table Mountain, die from stab wounds. And so, it’s the first time we’ve actually done trauma on bodies in — and so pig bodies — and they are clothed and what we — just as hashtag watch this space — but the untraumatized versus the traumatized decompose very differently. And I guess that’s not really surprising. It’s what we hypothesized. We thought we were going to get a lot of scavengers. Hashtag none yet. So, we’re a bit disappointed there. So, we’ve got this season, now it’s winter for us, and we’ve had a wicked one so far, so things are unique and interesting. And then we’ll do a summer deployment and we’ll go from there. So that’s where I’m at right now with taphonomy. And with W4C, we will continue in our drive to try and assist on the ground and we are revealing more and more every day how we can help in different and unexpected ways within the system and work within the system. So that’s where we’re at.

Yvonne Kjorlien: Wow. Several lifetimes’ work cut out for both of you. I wish well you on that. Especially on a two-year contract, Devin.

Victoria Gibbon: And I did want to say, Devin, how nice it was to hear you speaking and also seeing that, again, like what I said earlier, we both go into this work thinking our science is the solution, but actually it’s the way that we have moved towards our approach and the approach that we develop to forensic science that actually is movable into both the wildlife forensic space and in the human space because it ends up being, I think that’s the most important thing that our impact will be is really how we approach and hear from the ground to change the way we, our role and also the policy. So, it’s identifying the problem and then trying to do the policy change. It was so nice to hear you talk about that too. And Yvonne, thank you so much for creating this space for us and it’s been such a pleasure for us as well.

Devin Finaughty: Thank you, Yvonne. It’s been wonderful. And I also just want to say for the record that I have learned an incredible amount from Vicky. I mean, she’s complimenting me here, but it goes back tenfold. Vicky has been an amazing mentor to me. I couldn’t ask for better, and I mean that sincerely.  And I would encourage all the young scientists to find someone, to find their Vicky, that can help guide them and grow them. As that’s my hashtag advice for the day.

Victoria Gibbon: Thanks so much, Devin. I do think that we work well together, we’re complementary, Yvonne, and that’s also I think a big thing about being a good scientist is recognizing you can’t do it all on your own and figuring out the people who can complement and together you can do a lot more with additional skills, then you can do on your own and that’s definitely true for Devin and I.

Devin Finaughty: 100%

Yvonne Kjorlien: Absolutely.

Transcribed by Google

Janet Young is a curator of biological anthropology at the Canadian Museum of History, focusing on human skeletal collections. As a curator, she acts as a subject matter expert and bridges museum collections with research and exhibits for public knowledge.

In this episode we talk about:

You can contact Janet through the Canadian Museum of History: https://www.historymuseum.ca/learn/research/#close

Janet’s blog about her discoveries in the Barrack Hill Cemetery, The Bone Detective: https://www.historymuseum.ca/blog/bone-detective-introduction/

You can visit the remains of the Barrack Hill Cemetery at Beechwood: https://www.beechwoodottawa.ca/en/foundation/history/barrack-hill-cemetery-beechwood

****

Notes from the start

The first of the 2022-23 Saskatchewan videos of the Scavenging Study are up: https://yvonnekjorlien.com/scavenging-study/

I’ll place the mapping video here too once it’s finished — hopefully soon!

Support the podcast and my research and Buy Me A Coffee or Patreon. Your contributions will go toward my research, webhosting, and my time on this podcast. Want to find out more about my research? Check out the Scavenging Study.

Contact me through [email protected] or through my contact form. Follow me on Facebook at The Reluctant Archaeologist, or through Instagram @yvonnekjorlien

Do you have a suggestion for a topic on the Scattered podcast?

Do you have a question about working with human remains?

Drop me a note at [email protected]

Transcript

Yvonne Kjorlien: All So Janet, I’m gonna get you to say who you are and where you work in your role because I don’t want to mess it up.

Janet Young: Yeah, my name is Janet Young. I am the curator of biological anthropology at the Canadian Museum of History.

Yvonne Kjorlien: What does that mean that you are a curator? Let’s delve into that a little bit.

Janet Young: So a curator is someone who is the subject matter expert for different fields. So we have curators history, archeology, ethnology. So there’s a number of curators that work at the Museum and our role is to steward collections and work on projects for the general public, work on exhibits. So sort of the bridge between the content of the holdings of the museum and the public, is bringing that information, and doing research to add to the public knowledge about a certain subject matter.

Yvonne Kjorlien: Wow, and you’ve been there a long time.

Janet Young: Okay, so yes, I’ve been there a long time. I‘ve been there 30 years. The first — this is one of those things — that when I talk to students, I always say, you’re not gonna get the job at the top right away. So I started as a volunteer after I did my Master’s and it wasn’t even in my field, but I started volunteering at the Museum and eventually I made my way over to the physical anthropology section and then I started getting contracts and so I got a series of contracts for about seven years and then they created a position for me and then I worked in that first several years and then the curator of physical anthropology at the time retired and I ended up with his position. So if students ever come to me and say how did you get this position? It’s a lot of sticking to it and not giving up. And just doing your best to get your foot in the door and then working your way up. So yeah, it’s been 30 years. But as you’re trying to work your way into a position the time goes fast, so it’s not so bad.

Yvonne Kjorlien: And what is your educational background?

Janet Young: So I have an undergraduate degree in ancient history and archeology. My Master’s is from England, so it’s Masters of Science in human osteology, paleopathology and funerary archeology. And then I came back home and I started working at the museum and at that time I did my PhD in population health. And even though it’s a subject that is very much modern day and related to modern populations, the program allowed me to work on past populations. So it was a good fit for me at the time.

Yvonne Kjorlien: Nice. Yeah, those people in biological anthropology. We always seem to have very diverse backgrounds.

Janet Young: I know, right? You kind of find your way, find your path. When I first started, when I left high school many moons ago, I wanted to work in archeology and so, you end up on the circuitous path, through different programs and when I was done, I didn’t know what to do. So at that point there was really no computers. So you went to The Graduate Studies Center and you started looking through pamphlets to see what was interesting and I found one on human remains and that was it for me. That’s exactly what I wanted to do. And so yeah, it just starts on a path, but I think for a lot of people in archeology or in biological anthropology, it’s a circuitous path that really find what you’re interested in. So.

Yvonne Kjorlien: Yeah, and I find it’s not one of those I guess subjects that isn’t really talked about well in high school number one, so when you’re going into university and trying to figure out what you want to do for the rest of your life because everybody does that when they’re 17, they know exactly what they want to do for the rest of their life and then when you get to university, who talks about death and bodies and human remains like it’s just

Janet Young: Yeah, yeah, for mine it was classical archeology. So it was like here’s a pot, here’s a Roman pot, here’s another Roman pot and here. And so I knew very quickly that that’s not something I wanted to do. But I did take a death and dying class that of sort of piqued my interest in the subject matter and trying to understand how that worked not just now but in the past as well, so it’s sort of piqued my interest for that aspect of archeology that no one had into really introduced me at that point, so.

Yvonne Kjorlien: How did you start working with the Barrick Hill Cemetery?

Janet Young: So it’s really interesting. Well, I think it’s interesting. So when I was working on another project, someone from down the hall was actually the curator of Ontario archeology called me into their office and told me that was I aware of the excavations that were happening in downtown, Ottawa? So we knew that there was a cemetery there for a long time and so, I didn’t at the time, but someone that we both knew, his office overlooked the site, and so that’s who called my colleague. And so that’s really how I found out more details and then I had worked with the police quite a bit. So I reached out to the head of the Ident unit to say, I don’t know if you’re aware, but there is a cemetery there from the 1800s. And so at that point I was put in contact with the archaeologist on the site and we just established working a relationship. And the museum came in to an agreement with the city and so the city allowed it to be my research project and the museum gave me the time to do all the work.

So I was actually down on the site for two summers with the excavation crew. And it’s very odd when you’re… the first site was in one of the main roads in downtown Ottawa, so you’re below road level and there’s people walking by on the sidewalk, but they’re screened off. So you can see normal life going back and forth and you’re basically sitting in the middle of a cemetery. So I came at it, from, I don’t say haphazardly, but I was lucky enough to know enough people in and around the area that informed me of this project and I was allowed to be a part of it, which I really appreciated.

Yvonne Kjorlien: Tell me a little bit about the cemetery itself. So it sounds like downtown Ottawa was built upon this cemetery. And did they know that it was there when they had built up downtown and then what led to then the excavation of the cemetery?

Janet Young: So what happened was…okay, so it’s really an interesting story about how historical cemeteries are used.

So when Colonel By came to the region to build the canal, he had a lot of people, an influx of workers. So he came here in 1826. Canal construction started around 1827. So there was an influx of workers. There was really nothing on that side of the Ottawa River. On the other side of the Ottawa River, there was a lumber industry already but on our side of the Ottawa River there wasn’t anything. So when Colonel By came to town then he started bringing people in, people were hired to do different aspects of the construction. And then there was an infrastructure that came in around these people, so hotels were built and stores were built and stuff like that. So what happened was Colonel By was given the land that Lord Dalhousie had purchased. So it was a bunch of land where the Parliament Hill is today and then into Lower Town. Below that area, the land was owned by Nicholas Spar who was a former lumber yard worker. When Colonel By was doing the canal. he wanted land on either side of the canal so he purchased it. But then he also wanted the land below, what is now Parliament Hill, which is Nicholas Sparks’ land, because they were worried about creating a fortress or something should the Americans attack again, because it was a byproduct of the War of 1812. So what happened was he took 88 acres from Nicholas Sparks.

Yvonne Kjorlien: He just took it.

Janet Young: He just took it. I know they passed the Rideau Canal Act that said basically if you need any land for the Rideau Canal you can take it. And he made the excuse that the land was going to be used as a place to hold water, to help with the workings of the canal. Which was basically a lie. So he took the land. So in those early days, there was no settlers cemetery on the south side of the Ottawa River. People would be ferried over to the other town on the North side, but there was really nothing on the south side. So Colonel By gave, or set aside acreage, for a cemetery that was actually on Nicholas Sparks’ land that he had expropriated. So basically where the cemetery was below Parliament Hill, on a little walking path that went from upper Bytown at the time to lower Bytown. So it’s right in the middle and it was right beside a cedar swamp. So he allowed the cemetery to be created.

We really know nothing about the cemetery other than some of the burial records, but we really know nothing. Nicolas Sparks fought to get his land back and fought to get his land back. So in the late 1840s, he actually got his land back. And so, yeah, I know. It was a very long legal battle. He started almost immediately and he hired a lawyer and fought to get his land back. And so, the cemetery was still there and it’s right in the middle of this prime land, between upper and lower by town. So we started doing was selling lots in and around the area. And then he sold for very cheap price, land that was used for an upper Bytown Market. And we see little breadcrumbs in the newspaper about he paved this road or they made this road going through. So the remains were found on Queen Street. So about in 1851, I think, we have something in the paper saying that they put Queen Street through to the market which means they put a street right over the burial ground.

Yvonne Kjorlien: Oh!

Janet Young: So we start seeing that and it doesn’t look like the cemetery was ever moved. It looks like people who had money and could see what was happening, moved their loved ones. But there was never any formal moving of the cemetery. To the point where, in the 18– I want to say 1854, around there, people who are poor, who were in Bytown, petitioned the city to pay someone to remove the remains of their loved ones because they were becoming exposed in the area of this road. So, we know for a fact that the cemetery was not moved in any formal way.

And so the city just built up around it. Like Nicholas Sparks kind of just didn’t want it to be there anymore. So they just started, selling off lots and creating all these different infrastructure and then people just forgot that it was there. Basically, that’s what happened. Yeah.

Yvonne Kjorlien: Huh. But it sounds like it was used for what, 15, 20 years or so.

Janet Young: Mmm.

Yvonne Kjorlien: Yeah? okay.

Janet Young: It was about I estimate that it opened in the spring, I think, of 1828, the cemetery. And it was closed around 1843. So not even 20 years.

Yvonne Kjorlien: Right, okay.

Janet Young: So yeah, and they said it was two acres when closed? So, it was pretty big. Pretty big site.

Yvonne Kjorlien: Okay. And how many individuals do you figure at its maximum? Maybe…

Janet Young: Think the archaeologists thought about 500–

Yvonne Kjorlien: Really? Okay.

Janet Young: –at the time. And we only have small pockets of people and the cemetery was disturbed, starting in the 1870s, so maybe 20 years after it was paved over. People started finding bodies as the infrastructure was being put in.

Yvonne Kjorlien: Okay. So I guess it was just more of a natural urban process to build up over this cemetery.

Janet Young: Yeah, they just wanted to forgotten.

Yvonne Kjorlien: Wow, okay. then…

Janet Young: — which is sad, but it’s just, a lot of historic cemeteries have the same thing: take the way the headstones and just pave over.

Yvonne Kjorlien: So then, what were they doing that there was this excavation going on in the middle of the street and when you got involved. What kind of prompted all that?

Janet Young: Ottawa was putting in the infrastructure for a light rail service —

Yvonne Kjorlien: Ah!

Janet Young: — which runs now underneath Queen Street. But they were doing infrastructure work replacing water mains on Queen Street itself so that area is basically right through the middle of the cemetery and when they when they dug for to put in the water main, they hit bodies, basically, and then They called the police because that’s what you’re supposed to do when you hit bodies. And it went to, there’s the Ontario government, and when it was deemed to cemetery then the archaeologists that they hired had to go and enter an agreement between the city, the province, and anyone who was identified as a descendant.

The Ontario government put an ad in the local paper asking if you think you are descendant of these individuals, could you please come forward and speak for them. One person came forward, and she was not sure whether her ancestor had been moved or not. And so in the end she found out that they had been moved, so she was really not part of the process after that and the churches stepped in.

So the churches who had buried individuals in the cemetery — it was a settler cemetery, it was multi-denominational. So the heads of those churches became the representatives of the individuals.

So it was the representatives the City of Ottawa, the Province, and the archeology company who came to an agreement and I became part of that agreement for work on the individuals.

Yvonne Kjorlien: Okay. Yeah, it’s no small undertaking to excavate a cemetery.

Janet Young: No, it is not and I’m so happy that the archaeologists knew exactly what to do and how to do it because the remains were first discovered in late 2013, but they were not completely, they were not removed or excavations did not progress until the following summer. So it took, like, months to get everything.

Yvonne Kjorlien: Do you have any idea — I know you came later in the process — so I don’t know if you know this, but were they expecting to dig up bodies? Because I can only imagine the poor person on the excavator, just merrily digging away and then suddenly ‘What is in my bucket?’

Janet Young: I think what happened was the city had done a sort of an archaeological, it’s a sort of a report to say if you’re going to hit any archaeological sites, the city had done that. They were told that there was a cemetery there, but it probably been moved. So there was no expectation of finding anybody. And so I think it was a shock when they did. Obviously. But it’s funny because the whole site is crossed with construction events. So there’s a water main trench and then there’s a trench for Bell and then Rogers had done a trench line through the site, but they had dug at night. So when they dug at night, they did their trench they put their cement in and everything. So we were finding human remains on the underside of those cement conduits because they’re digging at night so they didn’t see. And so the fact that they were digging in the day and then they find something large enough that is recognizable to a construction worker? It was enough for them to stop the process. And then anytime there’s digging done in the area they have to have an archaeologist site to sort of watch them. And so the excavations at the site were actually… the Queen Street one was done one summer and the archaeologist had a map of the original downtown before there was buildings or anything. And there was one parking lot that had always been a parking lot. It had never been built upon, never been something else. To this day, it is still a parking lot. And so they’re thinking this is one place that’s not disturbed if anything ever happens we can excavate full individuals and not just truncated burials. And so what happened was the landowner got a permit from the city – I don’t know how — to do a trench for a gas line in the winter of 2016. And what did he do? He went right through a number of burials.

Yvonne Kjorlien: No.

Janet Young: And so, yes, yes. The pristine section. And so that’s why there was a second field season. In 2016, 2017 so that parking lot could be fully excavated but it was just supposed to be the street and then that happened. And then what happened — so if that’s not – so, and I don’t know who’s talking to who or if anyone’s talking to anyone, but for the LRT, they continued trenching down the road where the remains were found initially, so Queen Street. They kept going down the road. So you’re outside the boundaries of the cemetery at this point, all the way down the road. And they were still recovering human remains. And that’s because in the 1940s, a water main was put in down Queen Street and they were taking fill or dirt from the cemetery.

Yvonne Kjorlien: Oh.

Janet Young: And so they were depositing the people, basically remnants of the individuals all the way down Queen Street. So the archaeologists had it was something crazy like a hundred and sixty dump trucks full of earth, that they screened for human remains.

Yvonne Kjorlien: My God, that’s a lot.

Janet Young: Isn’t that a lot? Isn’t that crazy? I appreciate them so much. A lot of work. So the remains that we have for study were actually from those three events and the city is well aware of what’s in the area now and so they are very good about having an archaeologist on site when the construction crews go in to dig beneath the streets now.

Yvonne Kjorlien: You probably know more about that cemetery and about that area than they did back in the 1850s.

Janet Young: If it’s crazy about information that swimming in my head. Because it’s all a mystery. It’s like why does this happen? And you have to go through and you pull on that thread and you follow that mystery to figure out this or that or the other thing. I mean, it’s — and going through old newspapers and, to me it’s just fascinating to try and understand what happened. Why are these people left behind? What happened that the street could be put right over where they were? What happened? So it’s all a mystery and it’s one of the let’s see more interesting thing is to try and see if you can figure it all out. Yeah.

Yvonne Kjorlien: Let’s talk about some of what you found because I find it just fascinating and I’m hoping the listeners will too because you’ve got a blog, “Bone Detective” at historymuseum.ca so if anybody wants to search that, and I find your blogs are contain fascinating stuff so I was wondering if we could touch on some of them and if you’ve had some updates.

Janet Young: Yeah, so I mean obviously there’s lots of stories that have come out of the research and the reason why I initially wanted to do the blog series and the museum supported me, which is really great, was because it was ahead of the reburials and so the remains from that have been excavated have all now been reburied. So it was ahead of the last reburial. And what I really wanted to do is try to bring the people of Ottawa into that history that they might not otherwise know and about these individuals. And so I tried to cherry pick some of the individuals who I was able to do a lot of research on and I had sort of an interesting sort of connection to. And ones that, it’s like a blog series is what, I don’t know, 800, 1000 words. It’s really short, right? And you’re looking at it going, that is five years of work summarized in that little space.

So one of the individuals the one that was found to have all sorts of track marks — I don’t know another way to say it — on his remains and then perforations and then at this crusty substance that were in some of these perforations. And I was able to figure it out, but it took a really long time, you start with: is this something that the body is producing? Is it some for form of cancer? Is it something that he was experiencing? What’s the distribution? How do I see it? There was not a lot of complete skeletons at the site, and he had one of them which was very helpful, to look for distribution. So you start down that path and then you’re like, what are the accretions? Could it be a tumor? Could it be something from gout? Could it be… and so you start going through all of these ideas and then running them to ground and then you’re like, nope, that’s not it, nope, that’s not it.

And so it was really interesting because, when we first did the excavations, I had sent coffinwood off to be identified. And when the identification came back, he basically said “I can’t identify it because it’s bark.” And it was like, “what do you mean it’s bark?” And so I did that it just tuck that sort of information away. And then when I was studying this individual with all these changes on his skeleton, I remembered about the bark and so it occurred to me that it could be not something that he was doing, but something that was being done to him. So I actually did a lot of research and it came… the best solution to this mystery was that it was beetles. So because the bark in the coffins — and I have never found another reference to this. This is the only time… like I had to… there is no reference for this being done at all. And that is Ottawa was a lumber town, Bytown was a lumber town. And so they were taking the logs and they were squaring them in the mills. So they’re taking off the sapwood and the bark and squaring the logs. That sapwood and bark has no value. Even to this day, a whole truck full is 20 bucks. It has absolutely no value because these people in the cemetery were the lowest socioeconomic status, they were building their coffins out of these squarings. And they’re putting the bark side into the coffin so you wouldn’t be able to tell that they were basically the leftovers of the squaring industry. And so what happened was beetles, especially … there’s certain kind of beetles that were very prevalent in Ottawa because of the lumbering industry. They have a multi-year life cycle. So the eggs would have been laid, they would have taken these pieces and built his coffin and buried him. And then in the ground the beetle larvae would have emerged and the only food source was him.

And so the track marks and the perforations, if you look at a log underneath the bark, it’s all beetle activity where they’re eating the top layer of the bone. And then the perforations are where they are creating their nests. And the accretions that I send off for analysis and no one could identify? They’re actually frass. So that it’s basically the beetle poop that they used to line their nests.

And so that was what was in his bones. And so this is a multi-year process of speaking to lumber experts, to Ottawa valley experts about the timber industry, speaking to beetle experts from different places in the world, like trying to get all this information. And all that time and all these years have been put into a 500-word blog series. But it’s so cool, right? It’s one of those things, and that’s why I love doing this research,  there’s no mention of it anywhere. It’s just one of those things that they were just doing because it was cheap and easy, but it wasn’t shared widely. It was nowhere in the literature. It’s nowhere. And I think that that one to me is super interesting. And that’s not the body reacting to it, but actually the beetles creating something on the body.

I mean, there’s other stories of identifying what people were doing for a living based on the remains and one of the main ones that I put in the blog series was the lady who was, we believed to be a milner, which was another one of those — she was the only one in the cemetery. She’s lying on her right side and she had a mat of hair that she was lying on. And so first we thought it was a horsehair pillow and I sent the hair off for identification and it came back as human. And so there was a lot of coffin wood that was stuck to it. So I peeled the coffin wood away, and you could see the styling, you could see the curls, you could see how it was pulled back over her ear. And so it ended up being her hair. And all so within her cranial vault there was a very soft, almost loamy, it’s almost dry peat moss, that was inside her cranial vault and I had it analyzed and it came back as brain. So yeah, she was the only one at the site who had preserved brain tissue and preserved hair. I was working with a scientist Parks Canada trying to figure out what is this and everything like that. Then I started noticing skeletal changes on her and and so I noticed her teeth lot of pockmarks in them. Where I have a tailor from the site, he has the same sort of thing from holding pins between your teeth, but it wasn’t to the same extent so I didn’t think she was really sewing anything.

And then she had these changes inside her knees, where the ACL attaches, anterior cruciate ligament attaches. And she had some grooves on the inside of a patella. So I knew that she was holding her legs at a 45 degrees to create the grooves in the patella and that she’s pulling her knees together, seated.

I did some research and this is exactly the position that a milner would take. So the milner would hold a head form between their knees while they worked on it.  So that would explain the skeletal changes and dental changes that I was seeing. But, again, why does she have preserved brain tissue? And why does she have preserved hair? Originally, I thought maybe she was embalmed,  but embalming really wasn’t a thing during the use of the cemetery, it didn’t really become a thing until after the Civil War, but we do know that those early embalming fluids contain mercury. So I was following sort of that thread of things and early milners, they’re all so termed hatters and in sort of Bytown or early Canada a lot of them were female. It was one of those occupations that females could hold at the time. And they would work with furs to create hats, and working with furs, they would use mercury. And so we know that mercury was used embalming so we know that it helps preserve tissue. So I did a bunch of research on the hatting industry and what they do actually crosses into the body. So she had a high degree of — I think it’s organic   versus inorganic mercury — so it tells that she wasn’t ingesting it because inorganic mercury is not small enough to go into the hair. So it wasn’t like she was ingesting. It was being left, leaving her body through her hair as it grew what that wasn’t happening. It was being infused into the hair. And again with the milner industry, they would have a lot of mercury vapor. And so it was the vapors that were going into her hair and it would also cross the blood brain boundary when they inhale it. So that’s why you get mad as a hatter because they were inhaling the mercury. That would explain why her hair is preserved and her brain preserved and no one else at the site had it because she was a milner. 

And so again lots of little threads that you have to keep pulling and so you follow a trail and you get some information that doesn’t really make sense and then you follow another trail and eventually all those pieces can come together to create a really good story. And so, I mean, those are just two of them. The cemetery was filled with really great stories and things that I don’t understand either. So I have a child who had dark circles inside their eye sockets. And so I thought, okay, they might have been buried with coins because the silver, as it deteriorates, could leave a dark staining inside their orbits. And then I had it sent off for testing. And it was burnt. And it was burnt and a really high level of heat. And so these were actually scorch marks, but they were just inside the eyes. So, I know! It’s like what is that?

Yvonne Kjorlien: My mind goes to strange and disturbed places with that.

Janet Young: I know! And I don’t know — is that something that happened postmortem? Obviously, the person wasn’t thrashing around when it happened. So is it some treatment postmortem? Is it — what is this? So even though I have some of these mysteries sort of solved there are still a number of them where it’s still, like, okay, I have to try and figure this out, but it’s very lengthy process to go through to try and do this. But I feel like for this population, that I want to try and tell all their stories fully so to me it’s worth the time and the effort to try and really understand who these people were and so, yeah. I mean, they’re mysteries in terms of they’re very interesting, but they’re also a story that’s there from this person and just to be able to really understand those stories and to tell them for other people I think is really important.

Yvonne Kjorlien: So on that note, what do you think that learning about these past populations gives us here now? What is the benefit of studying the past. I guess?

Janet Young: I think the benefit is to understand that, as a population or any population, you weren’t just sort of plopped somewhere. There’s people that came before. There’s people had really hard lives, that worked really hard to get us to a point in history where we are able to have what we have and do what we do, and I think for me — I live in Ottawa population of million people — just one person and I have so many stories. So it’s the idea that every person has a history, every person has a story to tell and I think that connecting us to the past through these stories, I think is important to ground us in our history. You know, yes, it was Bytown. Yes, they did this, I said this they did that, but to say, okay, there was this person here who worked really hard who exposed themselves to really harsh conditions just to survive. And to understand that those people – like, this is the first settler cemetery of Ottawa. These are the people that did most of the living and paying and dying in this town to create this town. They are the beginning of the nation’s capital population. And I think that for us to be able to respect them, respect those people in the past, we can only hope that we are respected the same in the future. That we are people throughout time. We’ve had our challenges and everyone’s story is different and to be able to connect people today to those stories, and understand what was sacrificed for them to be here and to be in this town, I think it’s really important.

And for Barrack Hill Cemetery, what has happened now, is that Beachwood Cemetery, which is the National Cemetery, has created a Barrack Hill Cemetery within their borders. And they do tours.  And so all these stories that I’m able to decipher and provide them, are being passed down to all these individuals who go on these tours and try to understand the history of Ottawa and the history of the working class, even people — they’re not the people that had the money and had the power and they were the people that were there every single day working to survive. And so I think it’s important that we understand that. That we came from something, that everything around us was built by somebody else. And to appreciate that aspect of our lives today.

Yvonne Kjorlien: Yeah, we have a tendency to take things for granted. Don’t we?

Janet Young: Yes, we do.

Yvonne Kjorlien: It’s nice to be able to say, yeah, there are others here before us and they created this and you’re right, we didn’t just manifest ourselves here adults in this city place wherever there are others here before us and they helped create where we are today.

Janet Young: Yeah, and I mean a lot of kids didn’t make it. They went through several epidemics: smallpox, cholera, to create something. So yeah, I think that we’re less if we don’t understand what we came from. Appreciate it, even.

Yvonne Kjorlien: Right. So, what do you — you mentioned that the excavation took place in the middle of the street and you had pedestrians and life going on around you. What was that experience like when you had kind of modern day living people going on and here you were digging in the ground in the past.

Janet Young: It’s surreal, I guess.

Yvonne Kjorlien: Did you have people stop and ask you what you were doing?

Janet Young: No, because it was blocked they couldn’t see there was screens. And then what happened was after the excavations started, they put up tents. Because people could see down from the buildings because it’s right in the middle of downtown Ottawa. So people could see looking down from the buildings and so they put tents up. So there was some news articles about it happening, but the general person, and you could sit there and you can listen to people have everyday conversations walking by you and you’re like, wow. I think that anyone would have been fascinated by what was happening, but if you had opened it up, then traffic wouldn’t move at all. You’d have a gathering around, trying to be a part of it and understand it. So in that sense, it was nice that it was a blocked off, but really surreal.

Yvonne Kjorlien: And so the remains have been all reburied. I’m guessing or there’s still some undergoing analysis or investigation.

Janet Young: So they’ve all been reburied. So the ones excavated the first season, so 2014, they were a reburied in 2017. And then the ones that were excavated in 2016, were we buried in 2019. And then we just had one in the fall for the remains that were found throughout the length of Queen Street. So that was the final reburial. So there is three burials, and each is commemorated with a plaque at the new Bararck Hill Cemetery at Beachwood. So

Yvonne Kjorlien: Cool.

Janet Young: I want to say the city did an amazing job. They opened the first three burials. It was open to the public. They could come and was held at the Museum. They were allowed to come in and look at the boxes. So the City had made and everyone in burial box and tried to follow methods from the time. And so they were all there and people could come and pay the respects and try to understand more about the history and then the second and for the first second and third reburial They got a horse-drawn hearse, so.

Yvonne Kjorlien: Wow!

Janet Young: The majority of the remains were — except for the last reburial — were buried before, and then they had a representative coffin, and that individual was brought to the place of burial in a horse-drawn hearse that would have been representative of the time. So it was really well done. It was multi-denominational because many different religious groups were part of the cemetery. The City did an amazing job and trying to pull it all together, and to give them a respect that they might not had in life, obviously left behind where they were. So try to restore some of that respect to these people.

Yvonne Kjorlien: It’s interesting in the perspectives, because back in the 1850s, when the cemetery was still being used in the cemetery, the fact that it was paved over or built around and just wanted to be forgotten. It’s a very different perspective from how we treat human remains in cemeteries nowadays.

Janet Young: It’s very different. And I don’t know what that is. I don’t know how that evolved or why. There were early reports that people were using the crania the kids a soccer balls, the ones that were exposed at the site, right because there was a school nearby. And so I don’t know what that is. I don’t know how. They could have just done that now there’s articles in the paper for people who are going: you can’t do this, you can’t just go right over the cemetery, you can’t leave these people. But it didn’t change how things were handled at the time. I think the people that were part of the government of the city, they were just trying to they’re more concerned about their economics and they just went and did it anyway.

There was a large transient population at the time so, people weren’t really that linked to the past as much as I think now. But I’m amazed. I’m actually just amazed at that. But we have it to this day. We have old historic burial grounds that are now parks, right? So I mean a generation after Barrick had close — there is an area in Ottawa called McDonald’s Gardens, and anyone who has moved from Barrack would have been moved to McDonald’s Gardens. It became the next major multi-denominational cemetery for the town. It’s a park now because they remove the headstones — some people were moved to Beachwood, others weren’t — they remove the headstones and they made it a park.

And so it’s the same thing with downtown Kingston. There’s all these old burial grounds that people just removed headstones and just use the space of something else. And people don’t know that. It’s not part of the general knowledge of the people that live around these spaces a lot of the times. It’s just a historic view that people are not aware of. And so yeah, I mean, I appreciate the fact that we’ve evolved into making them parks and not just digging up the bones and throwing them somewhere. I mean, that’s an evolution in itself, but we would never think of doing that to this day, right?. There is application. Yeah strange.

Yvonne Kjorlien: Yeah, yeah. I’m conscious of the time, although I would love to talk to you just for hours on this. It’s so interesting just one last question and it’s kind of off on a tangent, but I wanted to know that, if you could go back and visit your younger self, 20, 30 years ago, what would you tell young Janet? That, I don’t know, you would appreciate now.

Janet Young: I would tell her to enjoy the process. I think a lot of times you’re fighting so hard to advance yourself and to try and get things done and do things, that you don’t enjoy the evolution of your skills and the evolution of your knowledge and you don’t enjoy — it’s a situations that you have to try and get through as opposed to appreciating them and enjoying them for what they are. And I think that, for me, that would be the one thing that I would go back and say relax, just enjoy what you’re doing and appreciate it. And yeah, I think that that’s the main takeaway for me.

Yvonne Kjorlien: Lovely. Janet this has been a delight. Thank you very much for coming on and talking about yourself and the Barrack Hill Cemetery.

Janet Young: Thank you for having me. I hope it didn’t babble too much. I have so much information in my head. So thank you for having me.

Transcribed by Google

Patrick Church is a funeral director, embalmer, and instructor in the funeral directing program at Mount Royal University in Calgary.

In this episode we talk about:

You can contact Patrick through Mount Royal University here: https://www.mtroyal.ca/ContinuingEducation/OccupationalPrograms/fu

****

Notes from the start

Find my books here: https://yvonnekjorlien.com/shop/

Find some of my art here: https://www.redbubble.com/people/YKjorlienCreate/shop

Support the podcast and my research and Buy Me A Coffee or Patreon. Your contributions will go toward my research, webhosting, and my time on this podcast. Want to find out more about my research? Check out the Scavenging Study.

Contact me through [email protected] or through my contact form. Follow me on Facebook at The Reluctant Archaeologist, or through Instagram @yvonnekjorlien

Do you have a suggestion for a topic on the Scattered podcast?

Do you have a question about working with human remains?

Drop me a note at [email protected]

Transcript

Yvonne Kjorlien: All right, Patrick. I’m gonna get you to introduce yourself. Because I always have a fear of saying somebody’s name incorrectly and that’s just not nice. So you know who you are, how to say your name, so please tell me who you are and what you do.

Patrick Church: Okay, my name is Patrick Church. I’m a funeral director and embalmer. I also have the privilege of serving as an instructor at Mount Royal University in the funeral director and embalming program and my specific area of expertise is embalming theory.

Yvonne Kjorlien: Wow, I am just tickled that I could get you on a podcast because I’ve always had an interest in embalming.

Patrick Church: Okay.

Yvonne Kjorlien: And I actually tried to get a job an apprenticeship, way back, 20 years ago when I was fresh out of grad school, but everybody wanted me to do the funeral services part, that the sort of sales end of things. I said, “no, no, no, I don’t do well with the living. I want to work with the dead.” But they didn’t seem to want that. They wanted me at the frontend doing sales and so it didn’t work out.

Patrick Church: That’s unfortunate. A loss to the industry.

Yvonne Kjorlien: Aw, you’re very sweet. Thank you. So let’s talk about how you found yourself in funeral services because I find that that’s always a very interesting journey for people. So tell us about your journey.

Patrick Church: So one of the things that I have been told versus my experience — so I don’t remember ever making the comment but my sister very clearly does — I told her at the close — I believe it was somewhere about ’86 — of my dad’s aunt’s funeral that I could do this job. We’re in the funeral home. And I just reflected to her that it’s a job that I could do. I don’t remember that. Now in university, I had a colleague who she firmly believed that I would make an excellent funeral director, that I just had the classic pieces looked good in black, I would stand demurely to the side into the back, and would not be obtrusive in families experiences and…

Yvonne Kjorlien: That’s very interesting that you had these people around you just volunteering this information that, hey Patrick, you should try a funeral services.

Patrick Church: Yeah. When I was younger, I always thought maybe law, but the further I went in university and as I was doing Master’s work, less interested in school, in that sort of eventual outcome. And so I began knocking on funeral home doors and, somewhat probably similar to yourself, I was met with the wall. And that wall was very much, you don’t have experience, we hire people with experience. Well, how’d you get experience? You have to be hired, right? So this weird catch-22.

Yvonne Kjorlien: Right! I am familiar with that one.

Patrick Church: Yeah, and so I knocked on doors and, when I was younger, I was probably a shyer kid. So I didn’t push or sell myself maybe in the ways that I should have. So I went into what I knew and was comfortable with and I started working with databases and non-profits and did a lot of work in that field until I had to eventually further my education. So I’m at a crossroads. I have to go back to school. Am I doing something that I really want to be doing? And if I really want to be doing this, how do I come to do it? And so I determined that I would probably end up going to university in the US. And at a place like either San Francisco or Los Angeles or Cincinnati where there were more open programs. And the year that I had made that determination, the Alberta Funeral Service Association gave me a call and said that the program in Alberta was changing and they would like me to be part of the first class. So all of a sudden sure it was there for me and I did not have to leave and incur a lot of expenses by going south of the border and so here I am.

Yvonne Kjorlien: I’m just amazed that you, I mean, if anybody else would were to have somebody, a friend, family member, come up to them and say “hey you should check out a career in funeral services”. I mean that would probably shock some people to receive that sort of feedback — “What on Earth makes you think that I would fit in funeral services?” other than looking good in black. Because you’re dealing with, number one, the dead. Not everybody can do that, and not everybody wants to do that. And you’re also dealing with this whole mountain of emotions that people, the living go through when dealing with their deceased loved ones. That is not for everyone. So for you to, one: take that, be receptive to that feedback, and then, two, to actually do something with that feedback that just, that amazes me.

Patrick Church: There was and they’re still remains nothing about the work that would intimidate me.

Yvonne Kjorlien: Okay.

Patrick Church: Does that mean I would have no learning curves? Most certainly not. In terms of the decedent, nothing about the body is so massively overwhelming for me. Now, I grew up on a farm. You’d always have the death of animals around you, not on an ongoing basis, but on those one-offs right with cattle, and we’re animals going to slaughter, animals dying naturally you were engaging with that. So nothing about the body would sort of throw any significant disruption to my world. I knew that.

Being with people is something that, like I said, I was shy when I was a kid and, you’re totally right, the funeral industry demands that you have to be pretty much front and center, and you’re dealing with people one-on-one and at a very horrible and weird time for them and you have to somehow be committed to being there with them. And I think that is something that I have grown into most certainly. But something I enjoy. I enjoy people’s stories. I enjoy chatting with people and learning about people and knowing people’s journeys, as much as I can in the short time that I’m with them.

Yvonne Kjorlien: Okay, I’ve heard that before from others that. either living on or working on a farm, it exposes you to, I guess, the cycle of life. It’s not the typical city experience where you’re very divorced and disconnected from that. You’re immersed in it, and it gives you a whole different appreciation for what goes on in the world.

Patrick Church: Yeah, I would concur.

Yvonne Kjorlien: Yeah, would you say then with that very early feedback (that you may consider a career in funeral services) with that kind of been a Plan B, or was that just something that was kind of always in the back of your mind.

Patrick Church: I don’t know if I had a plan, Yvonne. That’s the problem with myself.

Yvonne Kjorlien: Okay, fair enough.

Patrick Church: Was interested in law, but not interested enough ultimately to pursue it when it came time, and I had the opportunity to do graduate work. Was it a direction? I was going to go. No, it wasn’t. It did not hold my attention through university. So I guess I fell into it rather than necessarily having a firm plan.

Yvonne Kjorlien: So what did you do your Master’s in?

Patrick Church: Philosophy religious studies.

Yvonne Kjorlien: wow.

Patrick Church: I studied a Jesuit theologian by the name of Bernard Lanigan.

Yvonne Kjorlien: Wow, that’s big stuff.

Patrick Church: And yeah, yeah, he was a interesting voice in the 40s, 50s, 60s in parallel with sort of what was going on at the same time in Europe. An interesting character. Interesting thought.

Yvonne Kjorlien: Okay, but yet you found yourself working in IT and databases for nonprofits after all of that.

Patrick Church: Yeah, totally fell into it. Yes. My dad was a very early advocate of computers. We had a very early apple system. Back in the early 80s late 70s somewhere in there. he began and…

Yvonne Kjorlien: Wow.

Patrick Church: Yeah, so I grew up with them.

Patrick Church: They were easy for me to work with and play with.

Yvonne Kjorlien: Huh.

Patrick Church: And even in the 90s, it wasn’t necessarily easy and familiar for everyone.

Yvonne Kjorlien: Right. Yeah.

Patrick Church: So when I came out of school in ‘96 it was okay: where am I? And when the door knocking didn’t pan out, non-profit databases did.

Yvonne Kjorlien: All right, so things changed in the funeral service industry. You mentioned this cycle of nobody’s gonna hire you without experience. The only way you can get experience is being hired. Which I’m sure that, not just me, there are some other people out there that can really relate to that. But at that time, you said the funeral service education system had changed. Tell us about that.

Patrick Church: So historically the system used to be very much controlled by the industry. You would be working in the funeral home, and after the funeral home had the time to evaluate and determine whether you would be a good long-term fit in the industry and probably within their specific funeral home, then they would sponsor you into an education program.

Yvonne Kjorlien: So it kind of was like an apprenticeship or an internship.

Patrick Church: Yeah, yeah very much so.

Yvonne Kjorlien: All right.

Patrick Church: And then, yeah, that changed. The industry realized that maybe that wasn’t the best way of working. Or at least the school system that we had at the time.

Yvonne Kjorlien: Yeah, it was very, I mean, from my experience, which is 20 years ago, which may have been around about that time of this education change, I grew up with the stories of — my dad came from farming community, small town — and he would say he went to school with somebody who was apprenticing through their funeral home. And so that’s what kind of stuck in my mind that that’s how you do it. So let’s go out and I started knocking on doors, too. Which is where I met with the whole, yeah, you need experience but we can’t hire you and you would be better off to do the sales portion rather than the embalming portion, etc., etc. So yeah, that’s a bit of a catch-22 definitely, but things changed.

Patrick Church: Yes.

Yvonne Kjorlien: So you were able to go and get your education?

Patrick Church: Yes, which is fantastic. I was going to one way or another it. Just really worked out to my advantage that Mount Royal offered the program on behalf of the Funeral Service Association in Alberta that I didn’t have to travel. And go someplace else.

Yvonne Kjorlien: How long did it take you to do the program? Were you doing it full-time, part-time?

Patrick Church: It was full-time.

Yvonne Kjorlien: All right.

Patrick Church: So it still remains, you have a certain number of hours, apprenticeship hours, that you have to, practical hours, that you have to secure following the schooling. The schooling for myself in the first year was a full year of classes rather than spread out. So some programs rather than doing a spring and summer, will do just fall and winter, backed two years. And Mount Royal did the spring and summer instead of doing the two year. So it made it more appealing to go that route as well. The hours after — I forget the number at this point — but it was essentially a full year of work that you had to engage with.

Yvonne Kjorlien: And that would be at a funeral home, correct?

Patrick Church: Yeah, and you would be submitting various types of reports that would be part of the regulatory bodies’ evaluation of granting you a license. So you’d have your education component. So the college would submit that you have done your education (now university), you would have to submit hours that someone within the funeral home would attest that you have completed these hours, you would have to submit records of certain activities, specifically embalmings and arrangements (so sitting with families and sitting with the deceased).

Yvonne Kjorlien: So, sorry. So pretty much a year of classes and a year of placement in a home

Patrick Church: Yeah, yeah. And then the regulatory board receives all these attestations, and grants license. After you write your board exams. So that’s the final piece is the board exams.

Yvonne Kjorlien: And so are you typically learning and board-certified in both the funeral services and embalming, both at the same time?

Patrick Church: You can be separate.

Yvonne Kjorlien: Okay.

Patrick Church: Now when I went through the program, you could not be. You had to do both pieces. You had to become an embalmer and a funeral director. You could not separate them out.

Yvonne Kjorlien: Okay.

Patrick Church: The license was not a separate license. that changed in the somewhere in the early 2000s and they began creating funeral director only licenses and embalmer only licenses so that who wanted to focus in specific areas could focus in those areas.

Yvonne Kjorlien: So we’ve already kind of touched on at least a little bit of the evolution of funeral services, at least the education portion of it in the past 20 years, that things have changed. But funerals in general have a bit of history. I know, it sounds like you really get into the history of this, and so I’d like you to take us through kind of how funeral services have evolved. I know that embalming, at least in Alberta, and I don’t know about Canada, but it’s not a requirement. And a lot of people don’t know that, and then it’s not always been around. And so I’d like you to take us through, kind of a thumbnail sketch of some of the history. How did we come up to this? Why do we have funeral homes? And why do we have burials? There’s more of a shift to cremation nowadays. And why do embalming when we didn’t always use to embalm. Stuff like that.

Patrick Church: Yeah, the history of our industry is quite fascinating. When we look at, I think, the deeper history that we have with death, we find it’s probably something that’s very familial, something that’s very much centered in small community within a family home. And if it’s not happening within a family home, it’s happening very close to our community. The deceased is probably brought to the home or a central community space. The deceased would be sat with, they’d be watched over. Communities would bring religious and ritual elements to death, dressing of bodies and putting flowers with bodies other other meaningful tokens and elements before ultimately a body would be taken for disposition, whether that be at a at burial, at a cemetery, a community’s little cemetery, or whether that be a community’s point of cremation. So this would have been, I think, the experience most people would have had with death for millennia. It would be something that is is happening very much within a very small community structure.

And as I mentioned, we would have begun practicing ritual elements around death. As we see the rise of religious institutions, they would then begin to serve in a means between the home and that final disposition of interment or cremation. We would see with the rise of churches that we would then bring our loved one into those religious spaces for ultimate service and internment. When we are seeing the development of our large religious institutions, we’re seeing ultimately the growth of community and as communities grow, that brings problems to death remaining something situated in the home and in the small community. So, for example, when communities grow and we begin to experience plague years within large urban settings, community’s response is to move death outside of the urban center to the edge, and so we begin to see cemeteries not being community cemeteries, but being large urban cemeteries located at the edge of urban dwellings. That brings, of course, a level of sort of distance and bureaucracy to death. We will see larger institutions, for example, hospitals, prisons. Those people are going to, when death is experienced in those institutions, be buried in relationship to those institutions. So they will have burial grounds attached to those institutions. So again, death is moved away from our community. Or when we see people going off to war, bodies are going to be buried where they fall. There is no repatriation of death historically, there is no bringing our loved ones home. When we die in in battle, we are buried at the battlefield. So as communities grow and we experience these growth challenges, death is moved further away from that central space that would have been the family, the family home, in our very small community.

Of course, another factor is when we have the growth of. Communities. We also have the growth of communal living. We don’t necessarily have our own living space. We’re in shared spaces. And it’s not fundamentally feasible to bring our loved one into a shared space. And so instead, we have then the places, like churches, like our religious institutions, being able to step in and being able to accommodate and host our experience and our relationship to the deceased. So we have this movement outwards from the home.

Now things are happening in Europe and things are happening in North America. And I want to reflect first on North America, because something quite unique happens, and that is the US Civil War. The US. Civil War brings together horrible, horrible, bloody battlefields, where surgeons, where doctors are needed to address the wounded. These doctors, though, have gone through university where they had to train, and their training involved the preservation of deceased bodies for their study purposes. So doctors knew how to preserve bodies, how to embalm. So, while embalming happened infrequently, prior to this, very infrequently, all of a sudden, the US Civil War offered something that we had never seen before, and that is the opportunity to bring our loved ones back from where they died. We could repatriate them. And so we had doctors undertaking this work and serving as embalmers during the US Civil War, and coming out of the war, offering those services to their communities.

And so we see the rise in North America of embalming in the following the US Civil War in the late 1800s. And with this brought a number of just very pragmatic pieces. So if you are embalming someone, and if you are going to help arrange for someone to be taken someplace, you’re also going to need some sort of transportation receptacle, a casket or a coffin, to do that. And so these folks then were able to then sell these pieces of merchandise. Now that’s fairly niche and does not necessarily provide a living. So you know, you’re working with wood to build a casket for people. Maybe you could work with wood and have furniture. So our industry has this very close relationship to furniture stores, because lots of funeral homes were related to funeral stores, furniture stores in their very early existence.

And so we in North America now see, in the 1800s of course, the rise of, again, those dense urban living situations and apartment dwelling, again that’s not feasible to bring our deceased into those spaces. And so the again, most pragmatic space to bring our deceased to would be the embalmers home. So embalmers homes began to have parlors for families to be with their loved ones.

So we begin to see these, early, early vestiges of our community, as people are want to do well we have this relationship to. To bringing our loved one to church or to our religious institutions. People don’t always stay with their religious institutions. The curious thing about Western Europe is, of course, the Protestant Reformation and the leaving of institution to create one’s own religious practice and paradigm. And once that is something that is ingrained, you can’t really reverse that course. And so people vote with their feet, and they leave their institutions if their institutions are not speaking to them. And so you have this, in the — and I’m sure throughout all of all of time — a leaving of our religious institutions. So in the 1800s the early 1900s continuing to today, as people drift away from those spaces, then it’s not appropriate to bring our loved ones into those spaces. And so we have the development of the creation of chapels associated with the embalmers funeral parlor, and you will see many historical funeral homes that are anchored by a house that was the embalmer, funeral director, the morticians residence. And of course, as those spaces continually over time grow or get outgrown, then we see the more modern funeral home that is those chapel, those service spaces, those visitation spaces, an office space, rather than being tied to a residence, they are much more funeral homes as we experience them, probably today by the vast majority of folks.

So we have this trend in North America of bringing the deceased to to the funeral home, and we have then the creation of these, these service spaces. Now in Europe, we have something curious happening, and that is, through the 1800s, you have the development of crematoria and people working on the establishment of cremation spaces. And while cremation slowly develops in Europe, similar to here, it does not, it does not take off. But you have this. You have this different experience in Europe, where you have crematoriums functioning to offer disposition. And you also have something that we don’t have here in North America with cemeteries, and that is cemeteries being reclaimed, where graves are only used temporarily, and after a certain period of time, the bones of the deceased are taken from the grave so that the grave space can be reused, and then bones are placed into either charnel houses or some other large receptacle where the bones are stored en mass. And so Europe has this very different experience with with their cemeteries, and with their relationship to disposition that we don’t have in North America, but they had this focus on the creation of crematoriums. And so crematoriums come to North America, and we will begin to see them in the 1950s but we don’t really begin probably to see their impact probably into the 80s. And it’s in the 80s and 90s, that cremation really changes the landscape for the funeral profession and for the industry. All of a sudden you have this process that, again, well, death moved from our very familial community space ultimately into the space of a funeral home, now cremation allows it to move out of that space again. So our funeral homes, while they originally those early chapels modeled churches with chairs focused towards a pulpit or a podium where the casket would be at the front, just like an altar would be at the front. And often at funerals, we see that replicated so very much church like structures, funeral homes, in their very modern iteration, have become, rather than being sort of set have become more multi-purpose spaces to be able to accommodate very shifting needs of client families and consumers. And so that is a little bit where we are at and why we are at the funeral homes and the spaces and the practices that we are at now.   

    Yvonne Kjorlien: It sounds like from what you’re describing that being with the dead is very much a community activity, whether it’s to support the grieving of the family or to, just the community coming together to help out that the living who remains, and the focus of the community for a long time has been the church you look at the layout of small towns even now, I mean we’re starting to get away from it, but small towns across North America and even in Europe, if you look at the layout of a small town, usually the church is the center of the town and that represents the center of the community and that’s where people went to see their neighbors, you saw your neighbors once a week, you got the local gossip and he had some tea and then you went home and you wash, rinse, repeat again next week. And so it sounds like, from what you’re saying that when the population started to get such that the church couldn’t house those community functions where the funeral or the grieving process couldn’t be done just in the home, they had to find another bigger space to have those community functions, but at the same time, people started to disconnect from organized religion and to disconnect from the church. And so maybe people didn’t want to go to a church to do those community functions, but wanted someplace a little bit more agnostic or non-affiliated. And so it sounds like there’s been in the funeral industry, yes, a little bit of industrialization and then also evolution to meet different people’s needs a different times.

Patrick Church: Very much so. Well, the church speaks to what people are going through, it speaks and talks about death, right?

Yvonne Kjorlien: Absolutely. Yeah.

Patrick Church: It’s a big part of people’s lives and a big part of what gives meaning and what has come to them in the person of their loved one and what has all of a sudden being taken from them by this event? So the church historically, it’s part of their narrative, part of their conversation with their congregants, so it makes sense that people would want to be there for that experience of loss. Now not being a church person other than in name, it makes sense that it doesn’t necessarily speak to everyone, so I can appreciate why you would get that shift from the need to be in church, the need to be in that space, the need to contextualize your loved one within that setting.

I also understand that people still have that need to contextualize their loved one within that setting too. But if that setting and what it’s offering doesn’t speak to folks, then why go into that space? So here’s an interesting piece. Early in my career, you would have families who don’t want religion, don’t want the church stuff as part of their service. Yet who do we turned to, as Funeral Directors, we were turning to clergy. And we’re turning to more liberal branches of the church and saying “hey, can you help this family by not really being a clergy person?” And I always thought that was a little bit disingenuous of, not only ourselves his funeral directors, but for the position that we were asking clergy to step into in dealing with families.

Some families don’t mind some of the touchstones of faith, some of the prayers, some of the structure. But some families wanted very little to nothing of that. And yet we would still turn to these folks. Now very fortunately, at the same time we’ve seen the development of celebrants, non-denominational folks, people who are serving as chaplains in hospitals and hospices, who don’t have that solitary commitment to one church institution That they have to sort of somehow try and step away from or take out of their meaningfulness at that moment. Instead, we have people who have the ability to craft services that provide sort of ritual structure for families who don’t want those religious components.

So a good development in my opinion because it was always hard to ask a clergy person to not be a clergy person in that moment.

Yvonne Kjorlien: It’s hard to ask anybody not to be who they are.

Patrick Church: Exactly. Yes.

Yvonne Kjorlien: Okay, so we’ve seen the evolution, I guess, of funeral services away from or, at least, maybe less integration with faith, religion, and the church and to something non-affiliated. but we’ve also seen an evolution away from burial, embalming Tell us a little bit about that.

Patrick Church: Oh yes. The evolution from?

Yvonne Kjorlien: Yeah, because we’ve seen a lot more cremation, green burials.

Patrick Church:

That is very true. Now, our chemicals are purposeful.

We do need to employ them when we are for example, if someone is making a repatriation journey to another country or to another location. They are required by international shipping regulations. They also allow us time. Everybody will go through unique and individual changes and embalming buys time for families to be able to plan and to gather and be together, a very important piece. As you see the movement westward and people need to travel. They’re no longer in their home communities, so they need to be able to come back and historically travel, not being necessarily the easiest process. Embalming did allow for that time. Now, do we need to embalm everybody today? Most certainly not. And I would argue that the vast majority of bodies are not embalmed and do not bring those those chemicals to their disposition, largely because most bodies are being cremated, and that disposition is happening relatively quite quickly. However, embalming and the use of those chemicals does have a purpose now, the other piece is that the cemeteries have regulations around how bodies are buried within those spaces and those regulations will account for the, ultimately, the presence of those chemicals within the environment of the cemetery space. And I think a final point to bring to this is really those chemicals aren’t used in concentration. They are very much used in diluted A little bit of those chemicals goes a very long way in doing its preservative work. So while they are, they are used it is. They are used minimally, and I think by the industry, cautiously, and I think ultimately by by environmental agencies and regulations securely.

Yvonne Kjorlien: Because it sounds like that there are common practices in the funeral industry, like burial, like embalming and then there are regulations. And the two may not necessarily be the same. Burial an embalming may not be a requirement; it’s more of a standard of practice. Whereas vaulting depending on where you are maybe a requirement.

Patrick Church: Yes. Yes, burial is sort of a requirement if we just couldn’t keep a decedent at home, for example. I think most communities, most jurisdictions, most provinces who would be governing health wouldn’t allow for a body to be any other place other than medical research or buried within the confines of a cemetery. Now that doesn’t include cremated remains. But I don’t think we could just keep bodies at home. We would have to find cemetery space for them.

So we technically do have to bury bodies if we are not going to look at something like cremation or aquamation or body donation to medical research, for example. So there is then the requirement to bury within the confines of a cemetery.

Yvonne Kjorlien: Right.

Patrick Church: But creating a cemetery is very complicated and not anyone can just create a cemetery.

Yvonne Kjorlien: I can well imagine.

Patrick Church:  So how do you create green burial when you don’t have that option to create a cemetery? You depend upon existing cemeteries to create green burial for you. But they then have to have profound insight and practice, and they’re also governed by legislations that determine how deep you need to bury bodies.Tthe most excellent green burial happens in shallow grave not in deep graves with four feet of Earth. Microbial activity just doesn’t happen as efficiently and effectively at that depth. So when that call regulated, it becomes hard to look at anything else in a substantive way.

Yvonne Kjorlien: We get locked into our own perspectives.

Patrick Church: Yeah.

Yvonne Kjorlien: Interesting.

Yvonne Kjorlien: Because really what this all boils down to is just that the pragmatics of it that we need to dispose of this body.

Patrick Church: [ALKALINE HYDROLYSIS]Yeah, and all the regulations around, so for example, I believe Saskatchewan has an alkaline hydrolysis aquamation, where the body is cremated through waters and lyes. And there are the province of Ontario I believe has put a stop to further development. So two came in and started and then the province sort of we haven’t done enough Environmental Research and totally stopped. Communities have gone into big fights over crematoriums coming into their spaces, even though municipalities have zoning for crematoriums to operate and they operate relatively efficiently without any affluent or odor or anything that people are scared of when they think about being next to a crematorium. Yet communities have thrown up roadblocks to the establishment of crematoriums within zoning. So simple body disposal because that’s what it is, very ill and cremation are two primary means of it are hard to manage and negotiate around.

Yvonne Kjorlien: Righ. I find that very interesting. So I understand cremation. It uses a lot of energy to burn a body, but then there’s also the burn off. And it’s a lot of carbon and stuff putting into the atmosphere. But at the same time burial usually involves formaldehyde and all those lovely embalming chemicals which can then leach into the soil and the environment.

Patrick Church: [FORMALDEHYDE AND EMBALMING]That is very true. Now formaldehyde itself is, it’s isn’t that, none of embalming chemicals or the greatest chemicals to be exposing ourselves to at the end of the day. But they are purposeful. They do have a purpose. You think about folks who need to be transported overseas. Lots of factors can affect the need for them. Our bodies bring lots of challenges to being able to be well for services. Time and our ability to ensure good holding of bodies. Does every body have to be embalmed? Probably not, that is in embalmed, but it is a tradition that lots of folks follow.

Yvonne Kjorlien: So with all these new, I guess, options available now — green burial and, composting –where do you see funeral services, and maybe even the continued disconnection with faith and faith-based practices and rituals, where do you see funeral services in the next 10 to 20 years?

Patrick Church: Oh, to have a magic ball, right? To have a looking glass.

Yvonne Kjorlien: Right. They’ve done an amazing job over, even just 50, 60, 100 years of adapting to what people want, to their needs.

Patrick Church: The big adaptation that really came at the industry was cremation. That really forced the re-figure its relationship to itself somewhat. So you have, traditionally, when you do a burial, you have caskets, and you have funeral coaches, you have all these equipments that you have to engage with, you have all these revenue streams that you have coming to you. When you have cremation taking over, you lose those revenue streams. And so the industry had to begin compensating — not that the funeral industry is all about money — we’re gonna talk a little bit about it beyond that — but you had to compensate for lost revenue. And so you have unfortunate pieces arise where people would sell hard to families. You have, and would try and upsell on cremation containers because we have to put bodies into something when we cremate them. We have to be able to move them into the confined space of a cremation chamber, so they have to be in something. Every jurisdiction broadly defines it as rigid, combustible, and enclosed. So you have very at minimum cardboard, but cardboard doesn’t work for everyone because it’s not rigid for certain bodies. And so let’s move away from cardboard into your particle boards. And then you would have people who would push more elaborate containers and try and sell more elaborate containers on a regular basis. And so you got a disingenuous feeling created somewhat towards the industry, probably fairly so. People have a bad impression, I think, through for many years of the industry and relationship to being sales focused. And I think that was in terms of a compensation for those shifting lost revenues when it came to came to cremation.

Now we are also seeing though a rise celebration of life services. That are more focused simply on visitation, sort of reception pieces, and not focused on sitting in a chapel, sitting focused at a podium, or focused at a table with an urn. Not that those pieces aren’t part of those celebrations. Not that the deceased isn’t brought into those celebrations that urns our present. But the focus is for lots of folks shifting away from that that need to be in a chapel, need to be in that space.

Patrick Church: So I think that is going to be an ongoing trend, that will probably bring more challenges to the industry. Because at the same time is that rises, do you need the funeral home anymore? Just like with cremation, you don’t need the funeral home, you can take that wherever you want to take it and do whatever you need to do with it. The same when you do those celebrations of life and not those chapel services. You don’t need that space to be able to sit anymore. Well, maybe the funeral home has a reception space we can use that, but lots of places have reception spaces that you can bring stuff in and put things around for people to look at, that you can play videos, that you can pause it some point and offer a toast or a few words. Legions. Think of small town Legions. Think of bars, right? Depending upon the type of people. Golf courses, golf clubs. So there’s all these places where funeral services shift to when you don’t have to have that focused chapel space, and you just want to be doing a celebration of life party. Go to a funeral and ask people about what they want.

I’m in the industry. So I hear it all the time about what people want. But the people who are most vocal about what they want, don’t want funerals.

Yvonne Kjorlien: What is it about the funeral that they don’t want? Is that the faith? Is it that the somberness? Is the chapel? What is it about the funeral they don’t want?

Patrick Church: I think it’s a little bit of all of those pieces, right? So, for some people there is the drive away from seeing the deceased and being with the body is about experiences of seeing someone “put together” poorly, right? Their cosmetic work was wrong, their hair was wrong, things weren’t done well, and so they have just a poor last moment experience with this person. So those are still common stories. There is that peace.

There is I think the somber, the solemnness of the chapel, I think there is probably underlying it. Sometimes the costing of it all in people’s minds. Because the generation that we’re now largely serving is we’re at the Baby Boomers. Right? We’re just at the end of those who were born before World War Two, so at we’re people who were born in the thirties late 30s 40s early 40s, and we’re coming into the Baby Boomers who just the priorities of that don’t really mesh that well for them, I suppose. And I think it’s a little bit of all those pieces you identified.

Yvonne Kjorlien: All right, so it’ll be up to the funeral industry to see how they’re going to continue to adapt to the rising cost of funerals to, I guess, the increased demand of walking away from the somberness, from faith, from chapels, but into what, but that’s I guess the question that’s going to be up to the industry to figure out.

Patrick Church: So I think there’s a whole bunch of positive pieces and that is the industry has learned how to create ritual and offer meaningful ritual to families more than they probably ever have. Offering fantastic and creative types of services to really help be with families. Because we’re starting something very profound when we go through a service. People are on a long journey after someone dies. That grief journey is not quick. It’s not to be underestimated. It’s not to be thought of lightly. It is and — when I say with families, I can’t tell you and emphasize how precious that opportunity is because I get to hear their story about their loved one, the loss of their loved one. I get to be one of the first people who hear it. And it’s a story they’re going to craft over months and years. That story is going to change and shift with grief, but I get to be one of the first people who gets to hear that. And so the ability to, I think, be present to that sort of integral relationship with families has never been, I think, as well appreciated. The relationship that we have to grief work, is I think wholly remarkable at this point. Funeral homes are doing fantastic work with their communities, with their families in that post-loss period and people are taking much advantage of that.

I’ve never understood it, but I suppose it is correct, we had a homeless man the other day at the funeral home, and he just wanted to charge his phone. And so he’s having a coffee and charging his phone. Then he asked for a ride downtown or money for a ride. And so I said, “I have a vehicle. Why don’t I give you a ride?” And as we were on the journey, he asked me the question about my relationship with my death, like, how am I, what is my thoughts around my own mortality. And I’ve never really understood that we’re a death denying culture or if I really understand what that means. But I think the work we are doing is probably reflected in the fact that people have a difficult time with loss, so we must be in some way somewhat of death-defying culture. Because funeral homes that are doing the work with grief and outreach within their communities, there is just such fantastic need for it. People are really taking them up on that work, which is excellent. And funeral homes are really taking up that clarion cry.

There’s other pieces, I think, that are great and that is going to show, I think, profound development and that is probably as we do that work, we have a shift within the culture of, we have death doulas, we have entire pre-death caregiving community that just needs support and I think the profession is learning to appreciate and reach out to those communities and those folks who really are in, I don’t want to say crisis mode, but I would think are in overwork mode for sure. So the industry is really looking at needs of the community in very broad ways that sort of go outside of those traditional pieces that when we think about funeral industry we think about, I have to get cemetery plot, I have to be cremated, I need an urn, I need a casket, right? I mean I need to get right that those are pieces of it, but there’s much more integral pieces. before us. And so I think the industry is moving well in that direction to be with families and to be with the community on those fronts and to help lead where those places need.

Yvonne Kjorlien: Right, absolutely.

Patrick Church: Is that affecting ultimately funeral service and those pieces that are more imperative to your podcasting conversation about the deceased? I’m not sure that it is, but I don’t think in 10 years I’m going to see green burial shift around me. I would think that there’s lots of great opportunities for it. But I think it’s overcoming legislation. It’s overcoming lots of pieces and I really like to see it. Now it’s growing I think south of the border and it’s growing in communities on the west coast, and there’s some interesting changes, but I unfortunately don’t think they’re coming soon enough. It may take a more virulent pandemic to change those body engagement policies somewhat. I don’t know.

Yvonne Kjorlien: Maybe we’ll just have to see what happens. There’s just too much going on at the moment. Time has flown, Patrick. Thank you for sharing your history, your background, how you got into funeral services, the history of funeral services, and also what’s going on and how things may change. Thank you for coming on and speaking about all of that.

Patrick Church: No, not at all. Thank you for having me, Yvonne.

Transcribed by Google and Otter.ai

Ingrid Muhlig is the manager of DNA operations at the National Centre for Missing Persons and Unidentified Remains (NCMPUR) in Canada. The National Missing Persons DNA Program was launched in 2018 and is delivered by two existing programs within the RCMP.  The National Centre for Missing Persons and Unidentified Remains (NCMPUR) and the National DNA Data Bank (NDDB) were created to help identify missing and unidentified persons through DNA profiling. 

In this episode we talk about:

Kudos to everyone involved in the background who make this program possible and successful. Ingrid would like to thank the police investigators, everyone at NCMPUR, and the NDDB Missing Person Unit (MPU). 

More information about some items mentioned in the interview can be found here:

****

Notes from the start

Scavenging Study: new videos are up! They are here: https://yvonnekjorlien.com/scavenging-study/

The Gentle Rebel Podcast: https://www.andymort.com/62-unconventional-multipotentialite-yvonne-kjorlien/

Get my first novel Memoirs of a Reluctant Archaeologist here: https://books2read.com/u/38PrYL

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Support the podcast and my research and Buy Me A Coffee or Patreon. Your contributions will go toward my research, webhosting, and my time on this podcast. Want to find out more about my research? Check out the Scavenging Study.

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Drop me a note at [email protected]

Transcript

Yvonne Kjorlien: So, Ingrid, I’m gonna get you to introduce yourself because you know you best. And then you can say your last name for me too, so I won’t mispronounce it.

Ingrid Muhlig: So, my name is Ingrid Muhlig and I’m the manager of DNA operations for the National Center of Missing Persons and Unidentified Remains, so NCMPUR. You know the RCMP, we like our acronyms so it’s that NCMPUR. I will try my hardest not to fall back into all the acronyms but, by all means, stop me asked me what it is. If I do say one.

Yvonne Kjorlien: And you do you what? That’s exactly what I thought when I was writing up the little sort of outline of what we could talk about — like, is what I’m talking about what I think I’m talking about because there’s a lot of acronyms going on.

Ingrid Muhlig: Yup, yup.

Yvonne Kjorlien: All right. Tell me a little bit about your role. You’re a manager of a big unit, it sounds like.

Ingrid Muhlig: It’s actually a very small unit. National Centre for Missing Persons and Unidentified Remains is actually a unit of approximately 20 people. But those of us that are responsible for the National Missing Persons DNA Program — there’s two of us, that I’m the manager, I have and also a data, our DNA analyst who does the authorizing of DNA with, and she will speak with the investigators and go over the files make recommendations — so our side of the house, it’s National Missing Persons DNA program is actually, we’re partnered with the NDDB to steward this program.

Yvonne Kjorlien: NDDB. All right.

Ingrid Muhlig: National DNA Databank.

Yvonne Kjorlien: All right.

Ingrid Muhlig:  Yeah, and so we take care of mostly the administrative items: logging the information about the case, making recommendations to the investigator, finding out what’s available in regards to DNA, and getting an idea about the case to make those recommendations. And then the NDDB accepts the submissions that we’ve authorized, and they’ll process them and they do the science stuff of processing the DNA and reviewing it, uploading it to CODIS, and then, if associations occur, writing those reports, those reports come back to NCMPUR, and we’ll release into the investigators. Also to the legislation, the legislation that governs how we operate is under DNA Identification Act. And the DNA Identification Act also states that there has to be periodic reviews. So we really, on the NCMPUR side, we manage the life cycle of that DNA profile.

Yvonne Kjorlien: Okay, so if you could take me back a step.

Ingrid Muhlig: Sure.

Yvonne Kjorlien: In just my little preliminary, my own little investigation of websites —

because that’s called research these days — it sounds like the DNA program is very new. It just started in 2018.

Ingrid Muhlig: right

Yvonne Kjorlien: And it’s part of the overall missing persons and unidentified remains unit?

Ingrid Muhlig: It’s a program within the National Center, that it’s one of the services we provide to investigators, medical examiners or coroner’s office. So the National Center for Missing Persons and Unidentified Remains is a national program and it provides services to investigators, medical examiners, Corners across Canada. So we’re really an assist and we assist with different services and one of those being the DNA program.

Yvonne Kjorlien: Got it. Okay. Now, from that perspective, just because I don’t know who’s listening out there and what they know, and it’s something that I learned and in talking to when your colleagues from the Missing Persons and Unidentified Remains group, that things just don’t happen. Like investigators find some remains, efforts are made to identify them and they are, despite efforts, they are then classified as Unidentified. So that doesn’t just magically appear in your database. There is a process that the medical examiner or the coroner has to go through to then log that in the National Database, correct?

Ingrid Muhlig: Right. So typically when remains are located, they’re immediately put into CPIC and that – all police agencies across at Canada have access to it, they have the ability to search against it too, so if they have a missing person and want to search for potential remains, they have that capability within CPIC.  

What happens with our Center and our database — we call it MCMPUR, which is Missing Children, Persons and Unidentified Remains — I know you’ve spoken to Kevin about this database — what happens is when those investigators the remains into CPIC, it automatically feeds any body entries or any missing persons directly to our database.

Yvonne Kjorlien: Okay!  

Ingrid Muhlig: Then our database has some algorithms, which it starts doing comparisons of whatever has been entered into what’s already in that database and it continues to do comparisons to anything new that’s added.

Yvonne Kjorlien: Okay. But the search in CPIC does have to be done.

Ingrid Muhlig: The entry into CPIC does have to be done.

Yvonne Kjorlien: The entry does.

Ingrid Muhlig: And that is a requirement to participate in the DNA program. And that’s best practices that we preach to all police agencies, medical examiners, corner’s offices is that you need to enter your unidentified remains into this database.

Yvonne Kjorlien: There’s many little steps that many people have to perform to kind of log that entry in get it recognized on the national level.

Ingrid Muhlig: Right. And it goes the same way for missing persons. We want the missing persons in right away. And our mandate is to improve these investigations. So we know, when someone goes missing, the investigator might go and quickly put in the pertinent information that he has at that time.

But, as the missing person, as the days go by and we realize this is more of a long term missing person, our recommendations is always to the investigator go back and make a fullsome entry into that database, give us as much information as we can. So that automated searching and taking place in the background and they don’t even see it. And it can provide some clues or some information, investigative leads.

Yvonne Kjorlien: All right. So with that kind of in mind, since the DNA program, or the piece of it is fairly new – 2018 — what was going on before that kind of led to the development of the DNA program?

Ingrid Muhlig: So in 2000, you had the creation of the crime scene index in the convicted offenders index. And, I know at that time, we also had these humanitarian indices on the table that they wanted to bring forward along with those two indices, but there was a lot of privacy concerns and we had to do a lot of privacy impact assessments. So the best way to move forward was to drop the humanitarian indices and move forward with those criminal ones because that was very important to get moving on those ones. And then we brought in the humanitarian ones later, once they pass those privacy impact assessments.

Yvonne Kjorlien: And what do you mean by humanitarian? Let’s set up a definition on that.

Ingrid Muhlig: So, right so what’s happened is that typically, our, whatever’s going into our indices — so you have the missing person index, you have the relative of a missing person index, and you have the human remains index. So we consider those three to be humanitarian. What’s being uploaded is cases that are non-criminal.

Yvonne Kjorlien: Got it.

Ingrid Muhlig: And then…although the missing persons, the human remains indices do get compared to the criminal ones, by law, we cannot compare the relative one against the criminal indices. So it stays on that humanitarian house and it is never compared to any criminal indices.

Yvonne Kjorlien: Fabulous, so how… Okay, so we’ve kind of touched on how the data are gathered — I mean for the criminal or for the missing and the unidentified — but there are other ways that data can be gathered, correct? Depending on which indices you’re looking at.

Ingrid Muhlig: So I’m not sure if I know what you’re asking.

Yvonne Kjorlien: Investigators, coroners, and medical examiners can put in an entry in CODIS for a missing person or unidentified remains. But then there’s also other humanitarian…

Ingrid Muhlig: So there’s one called a voluntary donor index.

Yvonne Kjorlien: Ah, yes.

Ingrid Muhlig: And it kind of sits on the fence between the two because it has to be in relation to a criminal file or it has to be in relation to a missing person file. When it’s in relation to a missing person file, that submission comes to us to handle. And typically it’s really what’s happened. It’s typically family that’s pulled the information from maybe the national DNA databank website. And what we tend to do is we tried to steer them to make an entry into the relative of missing person index. Because when you put a submission into that voluntary donor index you have criminal Jeopardy now. You’re telling the RCMP that they can go ahead and search against the criminal indices.

Yvonne Kjorlien: Oh! Okay.

Ingrid Muhlig: So we’ll steer them to the relative of missing person index, if that’s the proper index for them to be in, and that way they’ll never be compared against those criminal indices.

Yvonne Kjorlien: Okay. That’s important to know.

Ingrid Muhlig: Yeah. We’ve had a few submissions and we’re like, no that’s not where you want to be. You want to be over here.

Yvonne Kjorlien: Yeah. Yeah. All right. I’m glad I asked that then. Okay. The public can make a submission. I mean to the right place. You guide them there.

Ingrid Muhlig: Right.

Yvonne Kjorlien:  If they have a missing persons that they’re worried about.

Ingrid Muhlig: The reality is we don’t deal with the public…

Yvonne Kjorlien: Okay.

Ingrid Muhlig: Because there has to be a missing persons investigation. The public should always go to the investigator of the file and then, if they’re not sure about it, they can contact us, and we’ll guide them through making that submission.

Some of these small detachments, they may handle a missing person case once in a blue moon, right? And then, typically, larger detachments, like I’m thinking of Toronto Police Service or Niagara Regional, they have actual missing person units, right? Where, that their investigators, that’s all they do. We’re very well versed with them and they’re very well versed with our procedures. So that’s the difference. It’s just, you know, the population areas and the smaller population areas might not know about this. And, although we deal with investigators, it’s something the public should be aware of that this is a service available, right?

The DNA program, also too the NCMPUR that manages Canada is missing website and you can get more information about different services from that Canada’s missing website. And we also published the missing persons or unidentified remains in hopes of receiving tips from the public on the different cases.  That’s the public component to our unit and the public can… there’s different addresses: you can go to Crime Stoppers, you can go right to the police and jurisdiction, or you can come to us and report information, that’s that Canada’s missing web email address.

Yvonne Kjorlien: Right. Yeah, it’s nice to be aware of these Service because there’s nothing like starting a service with all these good intentions and then nobody knowing about it.

Ingrid Muhlig: Right

Yvonne Kjorlien: Yeah, that’s yeah, you don’t want that. No.

Ingrid Muhlig: Right No. Doesn’t look good.

Yvonne Kjorlien: Exactly, right. Have you seen, on that note, do you know who’s using it? Has there been in an increase over the years? I’m guessing during COVID, there was probably a bit of a slump in who used it. I mean, I don’t know.

Ingrid Muhlig: You know what? During COVID, investigators were working back at the office and had seemed, it appeared like they had more time. So they start pulling out these historical missing persons and started going through them. So actually during COVID we had a bit of an uptick of historical ones because the investigators had the time to start pulling out these different investigations.

And it’s funny. Investigators, police investigators, are fickle bunch. They want to see value for the effort they’re putting into and, by all means, I agree with them. If there’s no value. Why are we doing this? Question why we’re doing this, right?

Yvonne Kjorlien: Right. Exactly.

Ingrid Muhlig: I knew when I started, if we start showing them the success and the associations, that they’ll start being more active within the program and definitely we’ve seen that. For our business model, we were expecting one to two cold hits a year and to be now five years in and we’re at 90 putative identifications that have been released. I think we’ve been very successful.

Yvonne Kjorlien: That’s pretty awesome.

Ingrid Muhlig: Yeah, for such a junior program, we are pleased with our success so far.

Yvonne Kjorlien: So I’m wondering if you can talk maybe, I’m guessing there’s a bit of a backlog because there’s this database or all this information, entries for missing persons and unidentified remains — so there is already that in place when this new unit came in 2018….

Ingrid Muhlig: Right. I think where you’re going is these historical ones, right?

Yvonne Kjorlien: Yeah, were you able to tackle some of that?

Ingrid Muhlig: We try and we thought it was going to be a lot easier than it was. And it ended up being actually quite difficult. But what happened was we knew there were already missing person files that had already profiles existing for them because they had done them at the provincial level for them. And we’re kind of like, okay, let’s, we gathered all that information before the, the database came into operation and then when we became operational, we started calling for them. But the issue we ran into is there is a specific consent form for the NMPDP, the National Missing Persons DNA Program. So the investigators had to go back, find the family that would been sampled, get them the complete these forms so they could be submitted to National. And that’s what I always say to the public also, is, I’m like, you may have given your DNA at one point, but if you don’t remember signing this consent form, it’s probably not at National. So another reason to go back to the investigator of the file and say, I would like my DNA put up at the national level.

Yvonne Kjorlien: Yeah, that consent. That’s a key piece.

Ingrid Muhlig: It’s huge. It’s Canada. We’re very protective of our personal information and nothing was going to be uploaded unless that specific consent form had been completed. So, you run into hiccups too or some of these cases are fairly old. So the people may have passed on, so then we have to go back to legal and what steps can we take can, we still accept it based on what they previously signed and so, yeah, there’s been a lot of learning curves for the program.

Yvonne Kjorlien: Yeah. Yeah, sometimes, I can imagine it could be really tough and frustrating but at the same time, the spirit of why that is in place and how important it is.

Ingrid Muhlig: And it has to be respected, right? It did cause a lot of work. And even in the creation of the database, we looked at, hey, do we only accept profiles, or do we take samples? And then at one point it was just profiles, and then it got changed and we’re like, no, we’ll accept both actually, profiles or samples, knowing that not every province had the money to create profiles out of these DNA samples, right? So let’s make it accessible to all provinces and territories. And now we’re kinda realizing that existing profiles? Not great because our technology is better now and we’re able to do better profiles. And now we’re going, not only do we do those STR profiles. We’re doing YSTR profiles. We’re doing mitochondrial. So we actually need that sample to be able to do that further processing if necessary, right? So, yeah, the message has changed over the years. We’re kind of like, okay, samples. Give a samples.

Yvonne Kjorlien: I’m glad it only took you five years to figure that one out. Yeah, that’s just it. Technology is improved vastly in 20 years and in five years, it’s changed. And yeah, are we gonna keep up with that?

Ingrid Muhlig: Yeah. That’s it. That’s keeping up with it and keeping in our lane too. So.

Yvonne Kjorlien: Yeah that – mmm.

I know that you gave a presentation for the Canadian Association of Biological Anthropologists in October and I missed your presentation. You know, there’s only one flight…

Ingrid Muhlig: They put me very last or second last.

Yvonne Kjorlien: It was on the Saturday. That’s all I know. There’s only one flight per day from Winnipeg to Calgary and it was during your presentation. So that was it. I had to be on it, so. Are there any tidbits in that presentation that you can share here? Take home messages?

Ingrid Muhlig: You know what? My goal there was to kind of intrigue those who were coming into this field because that’s who we work with, forensic anthropologists throughout Canada, right? With the unidentified remains. And talking to the coroners or talking to different people, it’s interesting how, on the surface they kind of know about us, but they don’t really know us in depth, right? So it was kind of capturing their interest and getting out there again: what the program does and how it can be used, right? Even like, for forensic anthropologists, a lot of times when remains are found they’re incomplete. With the database what’s nice is we can retain that profile. We know it’s been identified. But now we’re just retaining and comparing it to all other human remains that come in so we can potentially identify further remains for that incomplete’s unidentified — well, now they’re identified — remains. So that’s one of the nice things about it because when you get into arms, if you get an arm bone, yeah, at least if you have a skull or a mandible, you have some teeth, you might be able to get a dental from it. But yeah when you’re dealing with a single bone, it’s pretty hard to make that connection between the cases.

Yvonne Kjorlien: Or even a fragment of. You can tell it’s human. It’s definitely not animal. But, from there, where do you go?

Ingrid Muhlig: Right, right. And we’re seeing more cases of burned bones too. And that’s where mitochondrial does come into play. Although it’s not as descriptor, not as discriminative as nuclear, at least gives us the capability of dealing with degraded remains, so..

Yvonne Kjorlien: I’m guessing then, at least with mitochondrial, you can exclude.

Ingrid Muhlig: Right. YSTR and mitochondrial is great for excluding.

Yvonne Kjorlien: Right.

Ingrid Muhlig: when you cannot exclude, it tells you it’s that family, right? But it can’t tell you within the family tree exactly where they are. So you now need that additional metadata to come in and help support that identification.

Yvonne Kjorlien: Right. But, at least then, you’ve got somewhat of a direction then, which is always helpful.

Ingrid Muhlig: Yes. For sure.

Yvonne Kjorlien: You did mention cost. And, again, I don’t know who might be listening to this and everybody who has watched CSI, they think that DNA can just be… you know, it’s five dollars, you can get it on-demand, and you know, easy peasy, carry on. Let’s dispel some of that myth, shall we?

Ingrid Muhlig: I don’t know our costs unfortunately because I’m not on that side of the house. I do know we did go through another lab, a private lab, for some profiling. I think the STR was 450 or 500 dollars.

Yvonne Kjorlien: Okay, so that’s much cheaper than it was several years ago. It was in the thousands and it could take months, if not years.

Ingrid Muhlig: Yeah, so thousands you’re looking at now or for the genetic genealogy SNP [single nucleotide polymorphism] profiles. So YSTR, I think it was about 400 or 450, so to get it like a STR/YSTR profile. I think it cost us $950 from a private lab.

Yvonne Kjorlien: And what’s turnaround time because that would probably be non-priority, correct?

Ingrid Muhlig: No, that was a quick turnaround and I think ours, probably is for us to do is a bit cheaper because we do it on batches. Where they’re doing just that one case, right? So I would assume that our cost is a bit lower than that. Yeah, and that’s the problem too. It’s humanitarian. We don’t do priority but I can bump things up the queue, when necessary, but our turnaround time, like we say 30 to 60 days. 30 days, we aim for 30. Sixty days, usually it happens if the bones are degraded and we need to process it more than once.

Yvonne Kjorlien: Yeah. Yeah, that’s just because it is a destructive technique. Yeah.

Ingrid Muhlig: I had one case where mom had provided us the baby teeth for her missing son. And, you know, I’m a mom. I know how heart-wrenching it is to have to give up something that you’ve saved like that, right? So we were so happy because the lab was actually able to get a profile from the dried blood that was on the tooth. So we didn’t have to destroy the tooth. So you have these little cheer moments here like yes.

Yvonne Kjorlien: The technology has just come so far.

Ingrid Muhlig: Yeah. It’s crazy.

Yvonne Kjorlien: Okay, so you mentioned that you’ve 90 people identified in the five years.

Ingrid Muhlig: Right. So we provided 90, we tell we call them putative identification reports because in the end it’s the coroner and the medical examiner that it looks at everything, between the information on the file and the DNA and the breakdown of the DNA and they’re the ones who sign off on the identification. So yeah, we’ve provided 90. We’ve had a few international ones.

You might have read recently Toronto Police Service had a lady who had been pulled out of Lake Ontario in 2017 and they tried every avenue to identify her: media releases and everything. And they resorted to genetic genealogy. And it led them back to Switzerland. So then Toronto came to us and we’re like, we think she might be from Switzerland. So we were able to take the profile that we had in our databank and go through Interpol and have it searched against the Switzerland database and sure enough. It identified someone who went missing from Switzerland.

Yvonne Kjorlien: That’s amazing.

Ingrid Muhlig: And you think of it like I know I deal with the Yukon a lot and that’s majority of their people they have up there. There is a lot of tourists coming through, right? Niagara, too. So yeah, so we have these areas where they’re just… and we share a border with the US. So there’s a lot of times we want to do that search on the US side too. So we have that capability, which is nice.

Yvonne Kjorlien: I just love that, you know what? sometimes globalization works.

Ingrid Muhlig: Right. Yeah. Uh-huh.

Yvonne Kjorlien: You can actually call somebody up and say, “So, hey, I’ve got this missing, this person, unidentified person and we’ve got the profile. Can I ship you the profile and you guys take a look over there?”

Ingrid Muhlig: Can you check it out? Let us know?

Yvonne Kjorlien: Sometimes it works. All right, where do you see this going forward? You’ve already mentioned how far you’ve already come in five years and the technology has changed quantumly in with 20, 30 years. Where do you see this going in the next five?

Ingrid Muhlig: The next five? You know what’s hot right now and what’s really picking up, is these international searches.

Yvonne Kjorlien: Ah!

Ingrid Muhlig: I’m getting a lot more requests for people who went missing internationally. So it’s finding the best way to move forward with those I would say.

Yvonne Kjorlien: So, Canadian that have gone missing while they’re traveling?

Ingrid Muhlig: Yeah, the traveling or maybe it is a family member the family, may be like let’s say in England, but their son has come to school here, right? And now they can’t locate their son and he’s gone missing. Interpol has started an international database called I-Familia. And so it kind of works at the same concept as ours nationally but at the international level. It’s huge in Europe. Because those countries, people can pass through multiple countries within one day and there’s not really a tracking system for that, right? So the European countries will submit to I-Familia and then that way they know that’s being searched against all other cases within their area, right? So that’s something we need to look at and see what’s the best way of utilizing that database.

Yvonne Kjorlien: Right. Huh.

Ingrid Muhlig: So you never know when something’s missing, you use whatever is at your fingertips to try to locate the missing items. So I don’t think missing persons is any different.

Yvonne Kjorlien: Ah, yeah, that’s just it like we’ve got the technology and we just got to use it and make it work for us. Yeah.

Ingrid Muhlig: Yes, for sure.

Yvonne Kjorlien: Yeah, and I think that’s just it: that you don’t know what you don’t know. So it’s difficult, to, I guess, ask for specific help if you don’t know what that specific help is and that’s part of the reason why I wanted to talk to you about this is because I didn’t even know that there was this DNA data bank program going on, I knew about the missing and unidentified remains, but I didn’t know about this other part of it. And, like I said, sometimes you just don’t know what you don’t know.

Ingrid Muhlig: Right or have to experience it to kind of get away with kind of cultural thinking. And we did have some provinces where the police officers were like, if the person went missing here, we’re going to find them here. And, I’m like, challenge taken!

So I’m gonna when I get that inter provincial link happened then, yeah for sure, that said that’s a win for me in the sense that I could say this is why you need to come National. Don’t stop at the provincial level. You need to move on, to bring it up to National.

Yvonne Kjorlien: That’s just it. Yeah, you never know. The unexpected can happen.

Ingrid Muhlig: I see it as a safety net. It’s just an additional safety net that’s in place and can catch these things, right?

Yvonne Kjorlien: Alright, so is there anything that we haven’t covered that you want to touch on?

Ingrid Muhlig: I think our messaging to the public, when I’m speaking the public, is we really need the two sides of the stories to make that link. We need the missing persons and we need the unidentified remains story and we get the unidentified remains from investigators and medical examiners, coroners throughout Canada. But we see that we’re not always getting that missing person report and we’re really seeing that now with IGG in the sense that — are investigative genetic genealogy in the sense that — the ones that I know of that I have been following and they’ve been identified they were never reported missing.

Yvonne Kjorlien: Oh, wow.

Ingrid Muhlig: Yeah, so that really needs to be the take-home is that, if you have a loved one who you haven’t seen, who you can’t get a hold of, please make a report to the police of jurisdiction and get them up into the database.

Yvonne Kjorlien: Okay. Good to know.

Ingrid Muhlig:  Because I know to-date, we’ve always run with about 700 unidentified remains. 700 we need to identify. There’s got to be some people who missing …

Yvonne Kjorlien: There’s got to be some people missing. Yeah.

Ingrid Muhlig:  …that need to be reported so we can make those links to these unidentified.

Yvonne Kjorlien: Right. Yeah, it’s too bad that those unidentified remains, you don’t have any data on whether there’s scavenged or not because I would really like that information. That’s the information I want to know.

Ingrid Muhlig: Yeah, I don’t and unfortunately it’s not something we go into ‘cause that’s more, investigator side of the house.

Yvonne Kjorlien: I know. I’m gonna keep asking for it though because it’s my wish.

Ingrid Muhlig: If it’s items that we see that the investigators need to know, it’s definitely something we’ll look into but, yeah.

Yvonne Kjorlien: It is what it is Ingrid. I understand. We can’t all have everything.

Ingrid Muhlig: No, no. And It’s funny because, until I talk to you I really haven’t talked to anyone who’s looked at the scavenging point of it. Other than, I know, because I’ve had a few cases where dogs are bringing home bones from the woods and bring them home to their dog parents and then they’re calling police about it, which is to me it totally different. I’m here in Ottawa. We’d never even think of that right but my brother-in-law who lives out in BC. he’s got three dogs who just go into the woods disappear for half a day and then come back with these bones and I’m looking at them and I’m like are you sure none of these are human? That’s where my mind goes which is terrible looking at me going. No, they’re animals.

Yvonne Kjorlien: Okay, just so we’re sure. Hey, I hear ya. That would be my first question. You’ve got to check them out.

Ingrid Muhlig: Yes. Yeah, yeah, but yeah, it’s… Canada’s so vast and there’s so many different things that can happen. It’s incredible. Even the waterways, I know, I’ve heard a lot of Red River or Niagara and just doing that check of the waterways to see if any remains have come to surface. So we’ve got a lot of water here in Canada, and that’s where a lot of people can go missing for sure.

Yvonne Kjorlien: And people can go missing in those remote contexts. It doesn’t have to be criminal. People can get snowed in, and they’ll leave their vehicle and they’ll just get caught out and die of exhaustion. Or exposure, yeah.

Ingrid Muhlig: Exposure. Yeah, a lot of scenarios.

Yvonne Kjorlien: Yeah, a lot of scenarios in this very big country with a lot of remote areas.

All right, thank you very much for this wonderful conversation. I’m just so tickled that we finally had a chance to connect and talk about this. Yeah.

Ingrid Muhlig: It was great. Thank you for coming forward, and I’m glad we were able to chat about it. Like I say, it’s a service for the people of Canada. And if this is your situation, by all means, speak to the investigator of your files and get that story in so we can start working on making some possible connections.

Yvonne Kjorlien: Yes, right. Everybody should know about this service.

Transcribed by Google.

Dr. Brad Clark teaches journalism at Mount Royal University in Calgary and his research focuses on media representations of marginalized groups. Brad got into teaching after years of experience as a journalist at newspapers and the CBC, where he covered major stories but wanted more variety. I was interested in why journalists ask academics for comments on scenarios in which they are not involved, and Brad provided some great insights.

In this episode we talk about:

You can find more information about Brad at his webpage here: https://www.mtroyal.ca/ProgramsCourses/FacultiesSchoolsCentres/Communications/FacultyStaff/Clark_Brad.htm

More information about some items mentioned in the interview can be found here:

Thank you to the Community Podcast Initiative at Mount Royal University for letting us use the space to record this episode!

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Drop Yvonne a line at [email protected]

Transcript

Yvonne Kjorlien: All right, so tell us who you are and where you’re at. So I’m Brad Clark, I teach in the journalism in broadcast media studies programs at Mount Royal University here in Calgary. And

Brad Clark: My research and my interests in the field really focused around ethics and representations of equity deserving groups. And that’s, that’s what really, that’s really my jam, I, I really enjoy learning about how media can improve the way they do things. I like the way ethics are evolving and seeing how we’re becoming, I think, a little more sensitive to different aspects of our storytelling related to sources related to audience. And that’s, that’s what keeps me getting up every morning and coming into work. Wow.

Yvonne Kjorlien: That’s a ball of wax and a half. How did you get to where you are now? Because I understand you worked at the CBC for a while. Yeah. Yeah. So kind of take us on your, you know, your journey, sure to how you got from I don’t know, being a journalist out in the field. Yeah, doing that glamorous job, because obviously, you know, it is 

where you are now?

Brad Clark: Well, I can remember even being in a class and learning about journalism and thinking that this would be fun to teach someday. And, and that might have been like, around 1985, I got my first job as a as a journalist, as a reporter with The St. Albert Gazette, just north of Edmonton in 1986. And, and then, in 1980, and I went back to do a master’s I was I was always quite interested in in, I think, just just understanding journalism at a deeper level. And so going, going back and doing a master’s felt pretty natural. So I did that at the University of Cardiff in Wales. And that was a really interesting place to do that. I think the media then and now in Europe are a lot more outward looking, I find North American media quite inward looking. And there was there was, there’s lots of media there to take in. And so and then I came back, and I worked for CBC for a number of years, and I got to do a lot of really interesting work. I was a national reporter, I got to cover a lot of big stories, I got to do a fair bit of traveling. And, but I was starting to get to a place where I was always excited about telling stories, but more and more, it was just the big stories, not the you know, Brad, the Bank of Canada’s announcing a new interest rate today, we want you to cover the bond that is exciting.

Yvonne Kjorlien: If you hold a mortgage, that’s exciting news.

Brad Clark: Well, in those days, the Bank of Canada was holding interest rates pretty steady, there are a lot of a lot of on air live on air reports of nothing changed today. Which is never a great story arc for any kind of story, let alone a new story.

So I still kind of had this sideways glance at the corner of my eye for an opportunity to teach in and I saw a posting come up at Mount Royal. And, and so I applied in I got here and and I started teaching in right away, I became really keen and trying to find the vocabulary to talk about ethics and good journalism and good reporting. And part of that, for me, was starting to think more and more about accuracy. And who are we hearing from who whose voices are telling the stories? And it started to occur to me more and more that we were telling lots of stories about people from marginalized groups without a lot of input from them. And I can remember really kind of stumbling through trying to explain this to students and how, what strategies were to do it better. And eventually I, as Mount Royal just became a university decided to go back to school again, and do a doctorate. And so I made that my the focus of my doctoral research.

And so my dissertation was on national television news representations of racialized and indigenous peoples and, and that really kind of set me up for the work I’ve done in the last 10 years since then. So that’s kind of how I’ve, I’ve got to where I am now.

Yvonne Kjorlien:  Wow, fabulous. So, before we get any further, I wanted to explain why I’ve invited you onto a podcast about dead people. And, for me, it seems obvious, but you know, for a listener, maybe it’s not. So when I worked at the Pickton farm investigation, we had it was high profile, there was a lot of media attention. And, you know, a lot of us had journalists come up to us after we left the premises, and they wouldn’t even introduce themselves. And it was very abrupt, very direct, and I found it a little bit traumatic event. But on top of that, even though I wasn’t reading any of the media and either newspapers or watching the media on the investigation, I did hear that there were people, academics, that were commenting on the investigation that weren’t involved in the investigation. And I found that very interesting. And I didn’t quite understand why that happened. And so part of me inviting you, Brad, to the podcast is just to discuss some of that is why might an academic feel it’s okay to comment about something that they are not involved in. And, universities, academic institutions do promote that, they have it on their websites, that these are the experts that we have at our institutions that are available for comment, regardless of whether or not they’re involved in the situation. So I wanted to get some insight on that from you, but also because the dead can’t talk. And so representing them, I think is an interesting, I guess, population to fit within that the marginalized and the ethics of journalism. So that’s why I wanted you on the podcast.

Brad Clark: Sure.

Yvonne Kjorlien:  And I thought you would be fantastic considering your, your past experience and your research to talk about that. Yeah. So

Brad Clark: I think anytime anybody is asked to speak to the media on a subject, they have to be pretty upfront, they need to be transparent about what their background is, what they’re bringing to the interview, and what they can speak to, on a real level, what do they know about the situation to really offer something of value in the way of knowledge that that falls within their range of experience, and relates to whatever issues or themes or ideas that the interviewer is trying to pursue? And I think there has to be, maybe there isn’t enough of this. But I think there needs to be, I think people need to be a lot more upfront about what they aren’t able to answer to say no to questions. No, I can’t answer that. I have no insight. I don’t have any experience in that area.

Yvonne Kjorlien:  Well, can we just go back for a second? Sorry, um, because I, what is the purpose for a journalist to go and ask for a comment from somebody who isn’t involved? Sorry, I’m not getting the connection on that.

Brad Clark: So what I would guess is, using the example of the investigation into Robert Pickton, and that series of horrific crimes, that what journalists might be asking experts about, they may be asking about legal views of the legal process. How is the justice system work in this case? When the evidence might be hugely circumstantial, and, you know, what are the implications for the arguments that the prosecution in how to make how is the defense going to coach their case against the charges?

So it kind of depends on what aspect of the event that the journalist is trying to get a handle on. It could be, you know, you could talk to a forensic expert around how you’re how you try to, you know, sift through a site, like the farm to uncover evidence, what the approach is, those are those are things that academics have real background and information about.

If I can extend it to a different example, we can’t just talk to people who are facing end of life, to talk about assisted dying about the made legislation, for example, we need to we need people to interpret the law, the implications of the law. So we may go to professors at the UofC[algary] law school, for example, to make sense of the legislation. So lots of times what we’re doing, or what journalists are doing, when they reach out to experts is to get a handle on the deeper aspects related to the story, that are beyond the grasp of journalists, but also probably beyond the grasp of audiences as well.

Yvonne Kjorlien:  So, that kind of contextual, yeah, providing a context, but also that deeper, as well. Okay.

Brad Clark: That’s right. But in the example of assisted dying, I think you’d be doing an audience a real disservice, if you only talk to experts, if you don’t talk to people who are facing end of life in a way that is, can be, you know, very painful, can be very undignified in some ways, and some people may not want it to end that way. So to understand that, you know, you I think you need, you need voices, you need more than just expert voices, probably need more than voices of people who are affected by the legislation as well.

And, so now where I think where things can get ethical is, or unethical, is when people decide to weigh in, without really having the expertise to make the sorts of pronouncements that they make.

Yvonne Kjorlien:  Right. So I’m going to ask to take a step back, because journalism, I think, at least in my lifetime, has changed. And there’s now perhaps a view and it could just be my perspective, that I’m, I have trouble deciphering between the difference between journalism, and you know, people just spouting their opinions. You know, they say they’re from a media outlet of some sort. But what’s the difference between their opinion and actual journalism? So can you maybe give us a little bit of a history lesson or tell us what is the role of journalism? What do they teach you at journalism school that makes you a journalist?

Brad Clark:  Okay. I think there’s a lot to wait lots of ways to think of it. So journalism is a process of verification. Okay, so journalism is finding stuff out. So there’s, there’s an aspect of investigation, of exposing facts and truth. It’s a process of verification. Sometimes it’s a process of interpretation as well. Sometimes journalists are there to interpret the implications of government policy, for example, or they’re there to break down complex issues related to science, break them down in to a way that people can understand. You know how why does a vaccine work a certain way? How has carbon in the atmosphere contributed to the planet heating up? So some of that stuff can be very jargony, but it’s up to one of the things journalists do is find the common language that people use to understand that and, and express it in terms that, that that people can relate to and, and say, oh, okay, now I get it. So it’s almost like doing a public service for translating difficult concepts that would likely impact the public and the public. Probably should know about. Yes, yeah. So that’s, that’s, that’s that aspect of it. I mean, obviously, journalism plays a watchdog role in society, keeping an eye on people in power, holding power to account over the decisions they make, if they’re in government, or if they’re running corporations that have impacts on people. So there’s that aspect of it. Even the Charter of Rights and Freedoms, makes a lot of provisions for oversight of the judiciary and the justice system, so that we’re ensuring people are getting fair access to justice, whether as accused or whether as potential victims in crime or legal disputes. So journalism does a lot of different things. And, and so that’s, that’s what the intent is.

What’s happened in the last 20 years with the growth of the internet and digital media and social media is this incredible fracturing of sources of information. I heard an expression at this conference I was at recently, The Narrative Journalism Conference in Boston at Boston University. And the comment was from an expert in information, disinformation, and misinformation. And she pointed out that knowledge is expensive, information is cheap.

Yvonne Kjorlien:  Oh, nice.

Brad Clark:  Lots of times, when you’re dealing with stuff that you’re not sure about the source, it’s information, it’s cheap. It’s somebody posting something they’ve seen somewhere, heard somewhere, and just putting it up. Knowledge, whether it’s journalistic or academic or scientific, it costs. It has a cost associated with it. It’s taken effort. It’s involved people, verifying, investigating, and being thoughtful about how to frame it and how to write about it, so that people can see it and understand it.

And so, how do you how do you tell the difference between knowledge and information? I think a lot of it comes down to knowing the source. And, you quite rightly said, a lot of stuff comes from a source maybe you haven’t heard of before. That’s always a telltale sign, that’s always a good reason to start to be skeptical. It’s not to say that there may not be truth to what’s there. But it is sort of the first red flag that this may not be as rigorously curated as you’d like.

And then if it looks like it may be a reliable source, then who are the voices that you see in the content? What sources of information have they brought in to bring this account together? Are they talking to people with direct knowledge? Are they talking to people who have an axe to grind related to the issue? Are they only talking to people with an axe to grind? So, you can start to look for the perspectives that are included and excluded in in the account and you can start to think critically about the potential validity of the information and decide whether it’s something you want to put much stock in or not.

Yvonne Kjorlien:  Right. And I couldn’t help but notice that, what you just outlined, was what you outlined in regards to what journalism does.

Brad Clark: Sure

Yvonne Kjorlien:  They verify, they provide context, they do some knowledge translation, regarding jargon, and whatever. But yeah, if you do come across that piece of information that hasn’t kind of gone through the filter of a journalist, then you have to go and be the journalist yourself, and do that verification, the context, and figuring out how reliable is that information and is it actually knowledge?

Brad Clark: Exactly, yeah, that’s very much the process. And, you know, with, with information being so ubiquitous, like, not everything goes through the lens of, of journalism.

Pre digital media, pre internet, for better or for worse, we had gatekeepers in journalism, who really can control the tap on what made it into the public discourse. What was or wasn’t news was decided by usually powerful white men who were in positions of authority at news organizations all over the world. And, so that brought up kind of a particular perspective to the news.

But one of the things it also did was, it did involve pushing information through kind of an ethical and legal lens. So, things that were purely slanderous or libelous, they didn’t see a lot of light on pages of newspapers or in news broadcasts. Or things that were just straight opinion or that were BS. You know, there were ethical standards to verification to representations of truth that prevented some stuff from making it into the public discourse through the news media.

Yvonne Kjorlien:  they’ve provided the filters, but at the same time, they probably kept a lot of really good stuff out because they were, you know, the patriarchal white guy syndrome.

Brad Clark: Yeah, very much the patriarchal settler view of the world that and that’s been one of the beauties of social media is that it has allowed for underrepresented voices to circumvent the traditional gatekeepers. So you get movements that get traction like Idle No More like Black Lives Matter, that may not have got the same kind of traction in the past because of social media. Social media allowed them to sort of circumvent the gatekeepers. The other side of that is it also allows the far right nutcases to circumvent the gatekeepers too.

Yvonne Kjorlien:  So if you remove the filters on one, you remove the filters on it all.

Brad Clark: Exactly.

Yvonne Kjorlien:  Unfortunately, yeah. And what really brought, I guess, home for me the role of journalism, at least, how it used to be, was when I watched Spotlight, about the Boston Globe and exposing the sexual abuse and assaults in the 80s 90s in Boston in regards to the Catholic Church. And just watching the movie, and seeing how those journalists dug and investigated and brought that case to light. And I thought, oh, that’s what journalism is. That’s their role, versus something like Ancient Apocalypse.

And Graham Hancock says that he’s an investigative journalist. And I’m like, really? Because that’s not what I saw on Spotlight. Yeah, and I thought that was an interesting contrast.

Brad Clark: Yeah, the term investigative journalist is so overused, like it should really be licensed.

Yvonne Kjorlien:  Some sort of trademark you have to apply for.

Brad Clark: Exactly. Because, you know, the people who put out the 10,000 Mules documentary related to conspiracy theories around the stolen election in 2020, and the Trump conspiracy that ballots were stuffed, for example, those people would describe themselves as investigative journalists as well. And, work like that is really easy to fact check and verify, and people have. And people who actually could call themselves investigative journalists. So, that’s the problem.

Sometimes people are investigative journalists. And then sometimes people are “investigative journalists” with air quotes.

Yvonne Kjorlien:  But again, I think it goes back to kind of your checklist that you say, that provided before, about what journalism provides, that the verification the context, the diversity of voice, and ensuring that isn’t just information, it actually is knowledge. And but now we have to go through that check with, you know, the air quotes investigative journalists to actually ensure that they are actually investigative journalisy or not, and whether or not to believe them.

Brad Clark: Yeah. You know, another way to assess it, I guess I mentioned this earlier, but I’m thinking specifically of the air quote, investigative journalist, Netflix series Ancient Apocalypse. Like, I haven’t looked at that at all.

Yvonne Kjorlien: It’s a fun story. Sure, you know, if you want to blow eight hours and just be along for the ride, watch it. But in terms of actual archaeology and depth, not so much.

Brad Clark: Yeah, what I would look at critically, in watching that series is who are the voices? Who are we talking to? And what are the voices that are left out? And I think, I mean, I haven’t seen the series, but I bet if you do that, you come to understand the perspectives that aren’t there. It kind of reminds me a little bit when I was a kid, I was really, really fascinated by aliens. And, and there was, there was a writer who came out with a book and then it became a documentary. Something about the gods.

Yvonne Kjorlien: Oh, Chariots of the Gods.

Brad Clark: And then there was the sequel called Gold of the Gods and it was sort of looking, you know, taking things that seemed like they were difficult stories to explain, like the pyramids or the Nazca Lines in Peru. And so, you know, what’s the only conclusion you can come to? It must have been aliens. So, that’s kind of what comes to mind to me when I see that and it’s, you know, I don’t know what the logical terminology is, but the idea that sometimes the simplest argument is the right one. Like that really plays out a lot of times, and especially in a world where conspiracy theories are so prevalent these days.

Yvonne Kjorlien: Yeah, yeah. Yeah. It’d be interesting to get under the psychology of all that. I’m sure it’s there. Yeah, it was very interesting, because, you know, both programs were on Netflix. And so they’re demonstrating the continuum of accuracy of information. And even though Spotlight was a movie and it was fictionalized, I mean, they touted it, you know, fiction, whereas the Ancient Apocalypse was advertised as a docuseries, as truth. And I thought that was so interesting.

Brad Clark: Yeah. Yeah. You know, one of the troubles with the world today is the way people take the trappings of journalism, what Stuart Hall might call the professional code related to journalism and use that as a way to add credibility to the messaging that they’re putting out. So you call it, you know, kind of half-assed archaeological series a docuseries. You see it in branded content that is made to look like news articles. They come with headlines, they come with a little quote box with, they may include a little infographic in it to hit the key point.

I did some research for a book we did called The Blue Storm: The Rise and Fall of Jason Kenney. And I wrote about the Canadian energy center known as the Energy War Room. And if you go to their website, it has very much the trappings of journalism: headlines and subheads, and decks. They have a section called Matter of Fact where they fact check — and I’m using air quotes –usually media accounts related to the energy industry that they don’t agree with. And, we know that a lot of the messaging is very one-sided, the stories and articles that are put out by the Energy War Room, which was a campaign promise of the UCP to challenge what it referred to as the myths and untruths that people were saying about the oil and gas industry. But that’s a whole other side. But the point is, is that they try to give their views additional credence by taking on the trappings of journalism.

So there’s lots of stuff out there that’s made to look and sound like journalism. That actually isn’t. That’s just one more thing that you need media literacy to kind of address.

Yvonne Kjorlien: Yeah, that selective reporting, I think is very interesting, especially because I’m working my way through another one of your books, Journalism’s…

Brad Clark: Racial Reckoning.

Yvonne Kjorlien: yeah, that one. Journalism’s Racial Reckoning, and just how, especially marginalized voices have been excluded, and that is, you know, very selective about what information you choose to report on, choose to investigate, and could also be said about the dead because they can’t speak for themselves. So like you just illustrated with the assisted dying, you know, you can’t just talk with the experts, and you can’t just talk with the people that affects you need, the whole context, the whole picture. And it isn’t about being selective, and what makes the best story because it’s all about shock and awe, sex sells and what have you. You really do have to look at all sides. And I think it’s a matter of integrity that perhaps has been lost.

Brad Clark: Yeah, I think I think there’s that. I think also, if you look at in high profile stories, who the people are who constitute the dead they’re often people who have been invisible. They’re people who have not had the opportunity to be heard from and continue not to be heard from. Another clear example, and very much related to Pickton is missing and murdered indigenous women and girls. And, you know, other people are trying to tell their stories, and I think they’ve done a quite a remarkable job. But, that’s where journalism needs to be better, is to tell those stories before death, tell those stories, when something can be done to keep the people alive.

Yvonne Kjorlien: Right. Yeah. And I and I know this comes up a lot with investigations, officers after the fact, detectives after the fact, saying that, you know, what, if this had happened to somebody who was white, or in, you know, an upper class neighborhood, there would have been no question they would have got on the investigation, things would have been done right away, but because you know, is marginalized, indigenous, black, something, you know, woman they weren’t investigated or they weren’t investigated thoroughly, promptly. I hear that all the time. And that Murder in Boston podcast is exactly that.

Brad Clark: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, no. Another US example that I’ve shared with my students is when a young woman hiking a couple years ago, I think her name was Gabby Potito, went missing, I think it was in Arizona, or one of the western states, and it was just this flurry of media coverage. And it very much focused on her boyfriend very, very quickly. And people in the state, First Nations people in the state started saying, excuse me, like, you know, we’ve had dozens of women go missing. And you’ve, you’ve never reported on it. You know, young, pretty 18-year-old white girl goes missing and suddenly you focus all this attention on state efforts to find somebody. And so it’s very much the case. The double standard.

Yvonne Kjorlien: Yeah, yeah, it’s tragic. But I’m glad that we’re now it’s coming to awareness. For better or for worse, you know, it’s taken as long as it has to get here. But we’re gaining awareness, and it’s now: what are we going to do about that awareness? How can we move forward in a constructive and productive manner? Yeah, tough stuff all around. But it’s probably one of the reasons why I started this podcast is that talking about death as a taboo, and talking about the hard stuff is hard. But it doesn’t mean we shouldn’t talk about it. If anything, we should because it’s hard. We should talk about it. It’s probably hard for a reason. Yeah. And we’re just avoiding it. To no one’s benefit.

Brad Clark: Yeah, exactly. Yeah. Yeah.

Yvonne Kjorlien: So where are you going to go next in your research?

Brad Clark: Um, I’m working on a proposal with a colleague for a book that is going to look at disinformation, as it relates to marginalized groups and who often find themselves the focus of disinformation.

If we think about what we’ve seen with two LGBTQI+ in the last few years, even in Alberta, the issues around transgender youth, there’s been a lot of really significant misinformation about that. There was a time when people who wanted to take a run at queer people would brand them as pedophiles. And now they don’t use that language anymore for fear of being sued for libel. So now the term is groomer. And, this is some of some of the issues that we’re starting to see. And in the media don’t always do a terrific job of countering some of that narrative.

There’s a recent study that came out, just like in the last couple of weeks, looking at the New York Times coverage of transgender issues in the US. And some ridiculously low percentage of the stories included transgender voices in the article. It should be 100%. And I can’t remember what the proviso was, but in one instance, it was as low as like 16% included transgender voices. So you know, that’s just sort of one aspect of it. But that’s where I’m going next.

One of the things, personally, that I have such a tough time with, it’s the journalist in me, is when somebody says something that’s incorrect, that’s factually wrong, like, my body is wracked with energy to correct them. And that’s not always appropriate. But, the existence of either lies or falsehoods, or just information that’s invalid or incorrect, it just gets on my very last nerve in a way that, just it’s the very core of my existence. And so I think that’s kind of what got me on looking at EDI in media in the first place. And now, when we live in a world where misinformation and disinformation are so prominent, I want to kind of bring the two together.

Yvonne Kjorlien: Absolutely, yeah. Yeah, I don’t envy you at the moment, because you’re probably in a constant state of cringe. And because of all the misinformation and lies out there.

Brad Clark: Yeah. I’m prone to be listening to podcasts and start yelling as I’m running: That’s ridiculous. You can’t say that.

Yvonne Kjorlien: So let’s put on our positive thinking cap, if there was one, where do you see journalism in, maybe let’s just do 10 years. Is it gonna get better? Because you said you had some positive coming out of the conference in Boston. You weren’t expecting that?

Brad Clark: I guess I wasn’t expecting as much of it. But, yeah, I know, I felt like people were really celebrating journalism, in a way that I don’t feel happens very often. With journalism. You know, we’ve especially in Canada, we’ve been through so many layoffs. And it’s just seems like it’s been kind of a dark, ugly picture of the future of journalism. Lots of great students, students are really engaged and keen to make a difference coming into the program. So that part has always kind of given me some hope. But I think for me, what the conference did was just remind me of how important the role of journalism is, and the place for it, and the fact that people who are doing it are coming from the right place, they’re there. They’re trying to do good. They’re trying to address some of the issues that we’ve been talking about to correct the narrative to bring in more voices to tell better stories. And, and that’s the other thing, if we tell stories better if we can engage with audiences with important issues, maybe that can motivate more change as well.

Part of the conference was very much focused on narrative journalism. And narrative has been shown to be a really powerful tool in not just pushing out, misinformation and disinformation, but in combating it as well. So if we, if we can tell stories in a way that are fair and accurate, and engaging, maybe that’s a way forward to address some of the issues we’re facing with conspiracy theories, and, the rejection of science and expertise sometimes, as well.

So, I guess, 10 years out, I would love to see that kind of positivity gain some momentum and drive young journalists to continue to try and pursue the craft and get better at it. And I do see that.

There’s, a few years ago, I didn’t find journalism students necessarily looking to practice journalism. And I’m seeing that less and less. I’m seeing students come into the program because they want to be journalists, because they want to tell stories, because they want to hold power to account and make a difference. And so I hope that trajectory continues kind of an upward trend.

And the other part of it is, and we haven’t talked about this at all, it just related to the business model in sustainability. And I’m hoping that people start to recognize the importance of paying for journalism. You know, there was a time in the 1950s and 1960s when like 95% of Canadian households subscribe to at least one newspaper. So you’re paying for news every…all the time. And now and I’ve had people say this to me is why should I pay for subscription? Information is free. Well, remember, information is free, knowledge costs money. And, and so I’m hoping that more people will come to realize that. People pay for books. People pay to stream movies. Why should my work as a journalist not be paid for? Why does it not have value?

Yvonne Kjorlien: I think that’s just it. You know, what is the value? And that’s part of the reason why I wanted to come on and get you on here is to understand the value of journalism because it seems like, either, like we’ve lost the sense of the value, or it has been devalued, in some way, shape or form. And so I wanted to get your insights on that. And, you know, it sounds like journalism still very much does have value. We just don’t perhaps recognize that. In the slew of cheaper free information, what is the value of knowledge? And whoever provides that knowledge or cultivates it.

Brad Clark: Yeah, yeah, well, the other the other thing is journalism has been under attack, as a way to deflect from responsibility for a whole host of things. So, when any reporting is referred to as fake news by the leader of the free world, people start to listen to that as well. So we’ve we’ve been up against that.

Yvonne Kjorlien: Yeah. It’s hard to know who to believe anymore.

Brad Clark: Believe me.

Yvonne Kjorlien: I will, Brad. I will. All right. Well, I think we’re gonna end there because this was just, this was fabulous. Thank you very much. Thank you for your insights. And, yeah, if people want to reach out to you, I hope you’d be welcoming to them.

Brad Clark: Absolutely. Yeah. It’s been a total pleasure. Thanks so much. Fabulous.

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