Looking For Black & Indigenous Burial Grounds: Bonus Episode with Cadaver Dog Expert Cat Warren

Dog search team expert Cat Warren’s current work focuses on historical research, specifically: searching for abandoned or hidden burial grounds. This fascinating branch of search work combines history, racism, grief, and social reckoning. 

 

In this episode we cover: 

• How dogs let us talk about historical acts of violence in ways that seem impossible otherwise
• Are there bones in the highway you’re driving? Probably yes. 
• Where to even start looking for burial grounds someone wanted to keep hidden
• How Cat’s atheism intersects with searching for remains
• Cat’s version of hope: is it ugly, or is it beautiful? Hard to say. 

 

 

About our guest:

 

Cat Warren is the New York Times bestselling author of What the Dog Knows: Scent, Science, and the Amazing Ways Dogs Perceive the World. The book tells the story of learning to work with her impossible young shepherd as a cadaver dog to find the missing and dead. It won critical acclaim and was long listed for the PEN/E.O. Wilson Literary Science Writing Award. She taught science writing, journalism, and creative nonfiction at North Carolina State University for 26 years before retiring in 2021.

Additional resources

All of Cat’s information is at her website 

NY Times article on cadaver dogs and archaeology 

African American burial grounds & cadaver dogs

 

Get in touch:

 

Thanks for listening to this week’s episode of Here After with Megan Devine. Tune in, subscribe, leave a review, send in your questions, and share the show with everyone you know. Together, we can make things better, even when they can’t be made right. 

 

Have a question, comment, or a topic you’d like us to cover? call us at [phone] or visit megandevine.co

 

For more information, including clinical training and consulting, visit us at www.Megandevine.co

 

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Check out Megan’s best-selling books - It’s Okay That You're Not Okay and How to Carry What Can’t Be Fixed  

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
I love working with dogs. They make my heart sing
when they're doing good work. And it's not true that
we always sit deep in grief when you know, when
I'm working on these cases, these aren't my death. These
deaths belong to somebody else and my somehow, showing empathy

(00:25):
or taking on that heartbreak is both counterproductive, but it's
also kind of inhabiting something that's not mine to inhabit
here after. And I'm your host, Megan Divine, author of
the best selling book It's Okay that You're Not Okay.
This is a bonus episode with this week's guest cadaver

(00:47):
dog expert Cat Warren. If you haven't listened to the
main episode with Cat, be sure to do that too.
When I closed that episode, I asked Cat what hope
looks like for her right now, and that question brought
us into her work looking for forgotten historical burial grounds.
It is really fascinating work with a lot of relevance

(01:07):
to life right here and right now. So we're going
to join that conversation already in full swing. I hope
you enjoy it. So we've covered some like really intense
and complex complex territory, complex territory is my favorite place,
with so much complexity that you've lived, that you are

(01:28):
currently exploring, and so much of you know, we started
out talking about how like sometimes when people hear what
you do, they're like, like, how can you live in that?
Doesn't that seem really depressing? But so so much of
this is like the opposite of depressing. So what I'm
going to give you an option that I don't often
give people. I'm going to give you two options to

(01:50):
to give me an answer to, but like, what does
hope look like for you right now? Or bonus question?
Knowing what you know, knowing what you choose to focus on?
What does joy look like for you now? So hope
or joy, two very troublesome things, Which one would you like?
I think I'm going to pick hope And I think

(02:12):
I'll pick hope simply because I think we all always
needed we have to have it, we have to have
it as human beings. I don't think that hope looks
like what many people think it might look like. And
I think it gets back to the actually when you

(02:32):
said about you know that that moment of sun filtering
through the trees right that hope is often little, tiny,
interconnected things. So when I think about some of the
research and work that I'm doing now and thinking about

(02:53):
burial grounds um so burial grounds for the enslaved, and
bury grounds for Indigenous people's pre European invasion, and burial
grounds for the Native American boarding schools and the children

(03:14):
who are there, and all of those sound tragic and
are tragic. And yet I'm watching people who can't engage
as directly as one would hope with Black lives matter issues, right.

(03:38):
In other words, people who are not going to get
involved for whatever reason or me even come to those
subjects with a hostile and defensive tone. Right, But would
we talk about lost burial grounds of the enslaved. Those
same people find that work important and rewarding, and they

(04:06):
bring a care to that and an ability, you know,
we talk about dogs being away in I also think
that some of the work with burial grounds, with or
without dogs, is a way in for people who can't
face things like talking directly about police brutality against or

(04:28):
black communities, right, but they can think about the importance
of preserving a site where on a plantation there are
hundreds of unmarked burials, right. And I find this, I
find this interesting, and I find it fascinating and I

(04:49):
also find it hopeful because it tells me that there
are these different paths that you can sometimes take two
make people aware. And I think I'm seeing that with
the work on burial grounds, Florida is doing, despite its governor,

(05:14):
is doing more than almost any other state to both
locate and preserve lost burial grounds. And it's like, who knew.
There's just things come together in a way. And I
think that part of it is that, you know, we
talk about death being the great equalizer, and it isn't.

(05:37):
But it also is in the sense that I'm going
to sort of I know frames badly, but that each
and every one of us can relate to that idea
of that we want to know where our loved ones
are who are gone. It sounds like that that is

(05:58):
a familiarity point that makes entering this particular story, in
this particular facet of American and Canadian and frankly European history,
it makes it gives you an entry point because we
can feel that right, like yes, yes, and it's part
of that I need a place to go, right, There's

(06:19):
something about that human need to not be forgotten and
to not forget and for me as somebody who's an atheist,
and and where the whole issue of what happens to
my body? Right? And you know, I'm hoping for actions,
although there are the green burials that are starting to

(06:41):
feel kind of appealing, just kind of It's it's fascinating
that the place I've landed is thinking deeply about these
spaces of burial for people that need to be refound.

(07:02):
And I'd actually don't care really what happens to my body, right,
because we already have our stories. And I think the
issue of some of these urban spaces where you know,
widening highways and everything else, just who cares if an

(07:24):
African American cemetery is in the path of a widening
of a highway that outrages me for all the reasons
that I think almost anybody can see that and understand
why that's wrong. This is my hope, Yeah, And there's

(07:45):
so much hope in there, right. And again it's like
hope inside these things that sound terrible, right, Like truly
hope is inside the things that that are terrible, right.
And it's something you just said there that I really
want to pull out. You said, I don't about what
happens to my body. I already have my story, and

(08:06):
so much of the work as I understand it, that
you're doing now with historic research and looking at burial
grounds and looking at unmarked graves is about returning the
story right. And what's kind of tragic about that too,
but important to say is that the story is not

(08:29):
a feel good story. Right. The issue of saying facile
e of calling somebody in saying I've found the location
you're coined a descendant and saying I've found the location
of your of your ancestor who was a slave, that's
not a given that that's a good thing to do, right.
So there's there are sort of all of these, I

(08:51):
think layers of complexity. There's a descendant with whom I've
worked and she's done so much work on this urban cemetery,
and her great great great great great grandmother is probably there,
but we don't know because there's been so much desecration
and so much abuse and so much digging up and

(09:13):
using for roadbed skeletal remains that that becomes part of
a nightmare for her. At the same time that it's
deeply important that this place be saved from further desecration. Right,
So it's not like, yea, we've found where she's buried.

(09:35):
It's so not easy. Nothing's ever easy. But I think
that's really important that there's all this grieving yet to
do for people as they do find the stories, if
they find the stories, if they find the stories, and
that they aren't. The purpose of this work is not

(09:58):
to find closure. It's not to make a happy ending, right.
It is way more complex than that. And you know,
whenever we have these conversations, I always think about the
truth and reconciliation committees right where you are telling the truth,
because the truth has been erased, the truth has been whitewashed,

(10:19):
and just having the truth of the situation named does something.
It doesn't undo anything, it doesn't fix anything. It does
not wrap things up in a shiny bow. But not
being lied to and not pretending that terrible things didn't happen,

(10:40):
there is something very very powerful and hopeful in that.
And I love that your definition of hope is what
some people would call ugly. It's not ugly, it's real.
And I think just a little additional thing that you
sort of brought up for me is that I did

(11:02):
my dissertation on institutional silence, and I did it on
the silence of the powerful. So the powerful being able
to choose not to talk about things, right, And if
I think about what we're talking about and the stories
and the importance of truth and the importance of saying things,

(11:24):
it is precisely because people have been able to who
are in power, have been able to so completely suppress
that discussion, right, they are able to make the choice
to say nothing. Right. We talked about the silence victim,
but the fact is is that the silence of the perpetrator,

(11:46):
to me is what's still unacceptable. Yeah, and that's been
true throughout history and it is true now. And the
the ability of perpetrators, whether on an individual or a
cultural global scale, the silence of the perpetrator is what

(12:08):
lets those abuses, lets that violence continue. Right. It's why
control of the media is such a powerful tool. It's
why the rise of cell phones and being able to
document what's actually happening is so powerful because it's circumvents
that the power of the perpetrator, again on individual levels
and on much larger scales, and that there is something

(12:34):
very hopeful in that. I think that that's you know,
this is something that a lot of people have been
talking about this season on the show, and you know
off Mike as well, that things are and feel so
horrendous right now. And it is not that more terrible
things are happening, it's that we know more about the

(12:56):
terrible things that have always been happening. We have more
eyes to see in, more ears to hear, and more
ways to document, and more ways to pull that curtain
back and tell the truth about what's happening. And that
includes looking back into our history and finding those burial
grounds of the predominantly children who were taken from their

(13:19):
families and put into residential boarding schools. We have more
people looking into these unmarked burial grounds and these graves
of enslaved people's and looking at what we erase and
what we hope nobody notices when we are looking for
quote unquote progress, right, like you talk your reference like
putting a highway in something that goes through burial grounds.

(13:44):
So you know who who says history has never dead
somebody somebody. That's an actual quote from somebody, but I
can never remember who that is. But it gets really
big right when we start talking about these things. It's
sort of like oh my gosh, and then this problem,
and then this problem, and then this problem, this is
over here, and oh my god, like I understand why
we like a simple story. You've been listening to an

(14:08):
excerpt of my conversation with dog search expert Cat Warren.
Find her book What the Dog Knows wherever you get books,
and learn more about her work on historical burial grounds
at her website cat Warren dot com, and remember to
listen to part one too. If you haven't yet, check
out Refuge in Grief on Instagram or here after Pod

(14:29):
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(14:51):
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(15:12):
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(15:33):
made right. Want more Hereafter. Grief education doesn't just belong
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Learning how to talk about all that without cliches or
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(15:54):
Find trainings, professional resources, and my best selling book, It's
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Hereafter with Megan Divine is written and produced by me
Megan Divine. Executive producer is Amy Brown, co produced by
Elizabeth Fossio. Logistical and social media support from Micah, Edited

(16:15):
by Houston Tilly, Music provided by Wave Crush and to
Day's background noise provided by Luna and the wee little
birds nesting in the lemon tree outside my window.