Oldal 235 [235]
UNEARTHING RACIAL NECROGEOGRAPHIES...
Davis summarized the condition of the Black community cemeteries of Essex
County in one word: ‘Deplorable’.”° In Simcoe County too, Black graves were
not spared destruction: the Bethel Union Cemetery containing the graves of
hundreds of members of the Black community, was bulldozed in 1961 and
many of the remains were jumbled into a single mound.”!
Black communities’ sites have often been obscured by what Black
community members related today as being a necessary anonymity. Oral
histories point to Black families who “often purposefully didn’t mark their
graves and buried them under trees so that tree roots would overgrow them
to protect them from being unearthed by bounty hunters.”” A descendant,
Janie Cooper-Wilson, notes: “slave catchers could take back the bones and get
half the bounty.”” In her short film, Harding-Davis touches the tombstone
of a Black community member interred there and says, "thank you much."
This moment takes place in the film directly after we learn that the black
settlers placed their settlement behind a hill in order to be less conspicuous
to bounty hunters. Such communal histories point to the historic and
contemporary feeling and reality of vulnerability of the burial places of
racialized communities.
“INEQUITY AND THE DEAD”: DEHUMANIZING LOGICS
AND UNEVEN PROTECTIONS
As mentioned above, Marvin Charlie, chief of the Cheslatta in 1992,
asserted that the destruction of Chesletta cemeteries “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”. Charlie’s
assertion of the illegality of cemetery destruction is correct; cemeteries,
and the dead inhabiting them, have longstanding protections established in
British and Anglo-Canadian common law. How, then, have the burial places
of marginalized communities faced such clearly differential treatment?
I attempt to outline here a twofold answer: first, longstanding traditions of
the dehumanized or rejected dead from the norms of humane treatment, and
secondly, differential legal protections in North American contexts related to
the dead of marginalized communities.
20 Ibid.
Barrie Examiner, Clearview cemetery gains historic designation thanks to work of one
woman, Barrie Examiner, 14 May 2016.
2 Ibid.
23 Ibid.
24 Roberts, The Hidden Cemeteries of Essex County, 3:56.
* 233 ¢