Oldal 233 [233]
UNEARTHING RACIAL NECROGEOGRAPHIES...
protections afforded them. Finally, I will offer some examples of what Lagueur
calls “the work of memory”’, the tending to and reclamation of still-present
buried ancestors by communities struggling against erasure.
“DEPLORABLE”: ERASURE AND DESECRATION
In the present section I will provide a brief overview of the erasure and
desecration of the burial places of two marginalized communities in Canada.
The Cheslatta Carrier Nation in BC and the Black communities of Southern
Ontario have experienced this erasure and desecration in very different ways.
However, both have had the places inhabited by their communities’ dead
destroyed by the dominant white communities surrounding them.
Many of the burial places of the Cheslatta Carrier Nation in the interior
of what is now known as BC have been destroyed since the construction
by Alcan in 1952 of the Kenney Dam across the Nechako River, creating a
reservoir in the Skins Lake spillway, as part of the Kemano Hydro Project.
In 1957, the company released water into the Cheslatta River from the dam,
flooding approximately 30 graves. According to members of the Cheslatta,
“Coffins and grave houses were found floating in the water [...] bones, crosses
and debris washed up on the shore for years following the incident”. Alcan’s
reservoir system was built to fuel, and continues to fuel, its aluminum
smelting operations. As a result of the construction of the Kenney Dam, the
Cheslatta were forced to move, leaving behind their homes, places of worship,
and countless ancestral graves lost to floodwaters. Only 87 of the original
graves remain intact, in three different sites.” As mentioned in the third
part of this essay, even these remaining graves continue to be threatened by
Alcans activities."
Cheslatta leaders have long spoken against the destruction of their
cemeteries; in 1957, Robert Skin, a Cheslatta delegate to Native Brotherhood,
lamented that: "We have seen for ourselves the graveyard that used to be at
Cheslatta No. 9 Reserve. Its all gone and we dont know where the dead have
gone... All the dead have floated away and gone ashore somewhere”.'! Marvin
Charlie, chief of the Cheslatta, remarked in 1992, “It is against the law. [...]
The Criminal Code and the Cemetery Act is very specific about graveyard
desecration. [...] They send people to jail for such offences.”!* He continued
8 Ibid., 267.
Cooper Langford, Cheslatta grave flooding continues, Windspeaker Publication, Vol. 10,
No. 9 (1992).
Mark Hume, Native Band rushes to save grave markets from floodwaters, The Globe and
Mail, 5 October 2011.
Cooper Langford, Cheslatta grave flooding continues.
2 Ibid.
e 231"