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WILLIAM FELEPCHUK
by asserting that: "People ask us why we are making a fuss now. [...] Ihis
desecration has been occurring for 35 years. [...] They don’t know how long
we have been fighting this.” Cheslatta leader, Mike Robertson, expressed the
community’s frustrations in 1992, emphasizing that: “We are really pissed off.
[...] If they don’t come back to the table soon, we are going back to court”.
And in 2019, Mike Robertson Mike Robertson, Cheslatta’s senior policy
adviser, put the impact of the flooding in more chilling and immediate terms:
“There’s the cost of [...] finding the leg of your grandmother or your uncle or
your cousin. These aren’t ancient graves. These are graves as late as 1953. [...]
People are still alive that are directly related.”
The destruction of burial places is connected to wider dispossession of
Cheslatta territory, including the fact that Cheslatta people were compensated
less than whites living in the area who were forced to move. The dispossession
has had devastating effects on the community; Cheslatta Chief Corrina Leween
noted that young people still live with “the generational impacts. [...] We are
resilient, but there have been adverse impacts from the flooding and relocation.
There has been poverty, a high death rate, alcoholism, addiction, and violence.”®
The ecological effects have also been grave, including frequent flooding, which
erodes riverbanks and creates an outpouring of silt into Cheslatta Lake,
affecting fish stocks on which the Cheslatta rely as a food source.’®
In Southern Ontario, the historic cemeteries of Black communities have
met with destructive neglect and dehumanizing treatment at the hands of
local white communities. Windsor area historian of Black communities Elise
Harding Davis has “watched farmers plough over cemeteries, seen headstones
hanging in peoples’ living rooms and even fought for the town of Essex to
quit using a cemetery site as overflow parking for the annual Harrow Fair."
Glen Cook, a representative of the Lakeshore Black Heritage Committee,
noted that the Black community cemetery at Lakeshore had been “built over
and neglected, ignored”.'® Holding the dead of the historic Black community
of Elmstead, the cemetery was destroyed in the mid-20' century by the
construction of two houses atop the graves. Another cemetery, St. Marks,
has partially met the fate of many Black community cemeteries in Ontario.
Though part of the St. Marks burial place is in a small piece of open land,
this open area is surrounded by a field of crops, under which historians have
determined Black ancestors are buried beneath the ploughed land.'* Harding
Cooper Langford, Cheslatta grave flooding continues.
Trumpener, Homes burned, cemetery flooded.
15 Ibid.
Hume, Native Band rushes.
7 CBC, Hidden cemeteries of Essex County hold Underground Railroad history, CBC News, 1
February 2018.
18 CBC, Black cemetery in Lakeshore ‘built over and neglected’, CBC News, 27 February 2015.
CBC, Hidden cemeteries of Essex County.
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