Page 231 [231]
OCR
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. + 229 +
