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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 secondand 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. + 230 +
