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UNEARTHING RACIAL NECROGEOGRAPHIES:
BURIAL PLACES AND THE DISPOSSESSION
OF MINORITIES IN CANADA
—t1o>
WILLIAM FELEPCHUK!
ABSTRACT
This paper explores how burial places have been affected by colonial and racial
dispossession in Canada, and their historical, cultural, and sociopolitical
importance to minority communities. Burial places are often the only
remaining vestiges of a dispossessed minority community that has been forced
to relocate elsewhere. These burial places are left vulnerable to desecration
and destruction by the surrounding white majority. This paper takes as its
case studies two communities and regions in which the burial places of the
marginalized have been threatened: the historic black community burial
places in Essex and Simcoe counties in Ontario, and the burial places of the
Cheslatta Carrier First Nation of the B.C. interior. Both these case studies
are representative of wider patterns of the racialized destruction of burial
places. I focus on several of the eighteen or more black cemeteries across Essex
County,” as well as the Bethel Union Cemetery in Simcoe. The 19" century
and early 20" century cemeteries of the Simcoe region are largely populated
with bodies (or the bodies of descendants) of individuals and families who fled
enslavement or racial hostility in the United States.* The Cheslatta Carrier
Nation were forced to leave behind its three burial places when much of their
community grounds was flooded by a hydroelectric development in 1952,
leaving behind ancestors who were very much remembered by the living as kin
and close relatives.*
Carleton University.
2 Meg Roberts, The Hidden Cemeteries of Essex County, YouTube Video, 5:44,
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DHfUzQOIAM&t=19s (accessed 4 March 2018).
3 Though it should be noted that such traditions were complex, and that enslavement existed
in Canada, and in many instances, enslaved Black people from Canada would also flee to the
USA to obtain freedom. See Afua Cooper, Acts of Resistance: Black Men and Women Engage
Slavery in Upper Canada, 1793-1803, Ontario History, 99.1 (2007), 5-17. Furthermore, as
we will see throughout this paper, Canada was by no means an idyllic destination for these
individuals and the communities they built.
Betsy Trumpener, Homes burned, cemetery flooded: 67 years later, First Nation wins redress,
CBC News, 18 April 2019.
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