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OCR
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 ¢
