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WILLIAM FELEPCHUK
I am informed by Indigenous and Black scholarship/writing that theorizes
a geographical dimension to the racialized destruction inflicted upon
Indigenous and Black communities by white people — specifically by what
Sylvia Wynter terms Man (the white and western male as human), and
I extend this theorization to also include communities of the dead. Wynter
maps how the constitution of current racial orders is shaped by the “ongoing
imperative of securing the well-being of our present ethnoclass (i.e., Western
bourgeois) conception of the human, Man, which overrepresents itself as if it
were the human itself”.° This equivalence of the white with human in racial
discourse lends itself to the creation of “social-spatial regimes of second¬
and third-class citizenship”, zones in which destruction and dispossession
is justified through the dehumanization of racialized communities.° While
drawing on these theorizations to understand the geographical dimensions
of racial desecration, I also draw on the work of necrogeographical scholars
(those who study landscapes and places of the dead) such as Thomas Laqueur
and Richard Francaviglia, who theorize the importance of spaces of burial to
meaning-making and the work of memory in human communities, but whose
work can also be applied to how the dominant cultural community in Canada
— Anglophone white Protestants of British heritage — views death rituals
and burial, and the strategic inclusion and exclusion of the “forgotten and
despised”’ from these rituals. I argue that the vulnerability of the dead and
longstanding traditions in the Anglophone cultural sphere of dehumanizing
the dead have contributed to the desecration of the burial places of racialized
and marginalized communities in Canada. If, in the context of British history
and common law, those excluded from personhood in life were similarly
excluded in death, then it follows than in contexts of colonial or racial
domination, those communities excluded from full personhood would have
their dead suffer similar fates.
Having laid the groundwork for this paper, I will first chronicle how the
burial places of the Cheslatta Carrier First Nation have been erased and
desecrated, before doing the same for the historic black community burial
places in Essex and Simcoe counties in Ontario. In my second section,
I engage in a theoretical discussion of the dehumanizing logics behind these
desecrations committed by white communities in Canada, and the differential
Wynter, Sylvia. “Unsettling the Coloniality of Being/Power/Truth/Freedom: Towards the
Human, After Man, its Overrepresentation — An Argument.” CR: The New Centennial
Review, Vol. 3, No. 3 (2003), 260.
6° Clyde Woods, Life After Death, The Professional Geographer, Vol. 54, No. 1 (2002), 63.
7 Thomas Laqueur, The Work of the Dead: A Cultural History of Mortal Remains, Princeton,
Princeton University, 2015, 32.
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