The Tsilhqot'in people say the final resting place of Chief Ahan - and possibly hundreds of others - is beneath the asphalt of the parking lot of New Westminster Secondary School, in suburban Vancouver.

"We want our warrior back," says Joe Alphonse, Tsilhqot'in First Nation director of government services, from his office in Williams Lake, B.C. "We want to bring him home.

"Give us the bones."

However, one local historian says the bones likely aren't even near the schoolyard. In fact, Archie Miller holds little hope of Ahan's remains ever being found.

The Tsilhqot'in, a central Interior B.C. nation also known as the Chilcotin, believe Ahan's body was taken by horse and wagon to Douglas Road Cemetery after being executed for his part in the Chilcotin War of 1864. The school was built at the cemetery site in 1948.

Now a new middle school and high school are planned for the site and Alphonse says the Tsilhqot'in are ready to take legal action to stop the development until the bodies are exhumed.

They want DNA testing done to determine who is buried there.

The Chilcotin War began April 1864, and by the end of May one farmer and 19 roadbuilders were dead.

Decimated by small pox and fearing an influx of settlers into their territory, the natives attacked workers attempting to drive a road from the coast into the rich gold fields of the Cariboo.

A militia army of more than 100 people was sent into the area to find the aboriginals, but the formidable terrain defeated them.

After three months, the area's police chief invited the native leaders to a meeting. Ahan was one of six chiefs who the Tsilhqot'in say thought they were invited to peace talks when they were arrested.

They were tried by B.C.'s first chief justice, Sir Matthew Baillie Begbie, and sentenced to death. Five were hanged in the Interior, Ahan in New Westminster.

Miller confirms there was a graveyard at the site of the school but says it's improbable that Ahan is buried there.

Still, the New Westminster School District says because of the possibility, it is moving cautiously on construction of the new schools.

Vice-chairman James Janzen says a smudging ceremony for Ahan was held at the site in February.

"We are committed to dealing with this matter in a manner that brings honour to the Tsilhqot'in people and Chief Ahan," he said in a recent statement.

Miller, though, believes, the chief's body would have been interred in what is now downtown New Westminster.

And, he says, while some remains have been unearthed by crews during roadwork, with all the development that's taken place over the years the chance of finding remains are slim to non-existent.

New Westminster MLA Chuck Puchmayr says there is an outside possibility the remains could be found.

The MLA says bodies at the gallows site were often aboriginal, as Europeans were rarely executed. If those can be found, there may be a chance.

"The Chilcotin still have a strong lineage to Ahan for DNA," he says.

"There's a resolution there if everyone's willing and if you cut the politics out of it."

The Tsilhqot'in want some vindication of their chief.

"We want Canada to acknowledge there was injustice done and he was one of six Chilcotin war chiefs that was wrongfully tried and wrongfully executed," Alphonse says.

"They weren't murderers. It was an act of war."

Five of the chiefs were hanged in Quesnel and Ahan in New Westminster.

As the result of recommendations in a 1993 report commissioned by the B.C. government into the relationship between aboriginals and the justice system, the provincial attorney general apologized for the hanging of the Chilcotin Chiefs and provided funding for the archeological excavation of their graves to ensure a proper burial.

"That's never happened," Alphonse says. "To date, they have still to live up to that recommendation."

He says the Tsilhqot'in have located the remains of five chiefs in the Interior and want to repatriate the remains of all six.

"We want to bring them home, bury them on our land where they're going to be worshipped not build a frigging' high school over top of their graves," he says.

Ahan aside, Alphonse says the province owes an explanation to the descendants of all the people whose bones lay beneath of the parking lot. DNA samples should be taken from every bone, he says.

"We believe the location is a Canadian heritage site," Alphonse adds. "What are they going to do with all the other bodies that are buried at that location?"

The fact that Begbie's statue presides over the current courthouse plaza opposite the gallows site is an insult, he says.

In October 1999, 135 years after the hangings, a plaque was unveiled by a Tsilhqot'in chief at the regional hospital in Quesnel, B.C., in the Interior.

It says in English and Tsilhquot'in: "We meant war, not murder," the last words of one of the hanged chiefs.