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WILLIAM FELEPCHUK
Thomas Laqueur argues that historically, for people of British extraction,
lack of a proper burial represented “a posthumous exclusion from the cultural
and political order, an obliteration of personhood, after death.” I argue that
this dehumanizing exclusion — this denial of personhood after death — is
enacted in racialized forms on the collective sites of Indigenous and Black
communities in Canada. In English speaking Canada, (which has been
profoundly shaped by loyalism, Protestantism and Orangeism), the worldview
and traditions of British necrocultural practices shaped the social order.
In England, those who did not belong in life were further condemned in
death. Lacqueur notes that “the bodies of outlaws — criminals and traders —
were statutorily forfeit to the King who could order that they be hung from
gibbets or burnt or, increasingly after the 1720s sent from the gallows to the
anatomy theatre, where surgeons cut them before a large public audience.””*
In North America such posthumous barbarism was often reserved for the
dead of Black communities: in the USA, it was common for Black community
cemeteries, which were often municipal sites without the protections of more
privileged private cemeteries, to be pillaged for bodies to be used in medical
colleges.”” This scientific desecration finds its parallel in the disinterment
of Indigenous remains throughout North America, with many Indigenous
bodies being held in the collections of museums. Many Black community
members who escaped slavery and racial dehumanization in the South by
fleeing to Canada, met a fate, which, as chronicled below, was equally one of
posthumous dehumanization.
Protestant settlers from the British Isles belonged to a long tradition of
shaming the dead geographically and rejecting bodies that were “profoundly
out of place”? in the eyes of the community. For bodies to be out of place, there
needed to be a normative place to which bodies belonged. Indeed, English
common law recognized “an immemorial right to be buried somewhere.”?
Somewhere, as we will note in section three of this paper, was intimately tied
to ones church community. English law recognized the maxim “ubi decims
persolvevat vivens, sepeliatur mortuus — where pays the tithe while alive, let
25 Laqueur, The Work of the Dead, 148.
26 Tbid.
See Rich Griset, Chasing Down a Body Snatcher: VCU Professor Documents Story of
"Inside Man Who Stole Cadavers from Black Cemeteries for the Local Medical College in
19% Century, Diverse Issues in Higher Education 27.18 (2010), 9, and Edward C. Halperin,
The Poor, the Black, and the Marginalized as the Source of Cadavers in United States
Anatomical Education, Clinical Anatomy, Vol. 20, No. 5 (2007), 489-495. For mention of
this grim phenomenon in a Canadian context, see Naomi Norquay, ‘If we don’t try, then
shame on us!’: An Interview with Janie Cooper-Wilson, Northern Terminus: The African
Canadian History Journal, Vol. 13 (2016), 10.
2 Laqueur, The Work of the Dead, 148.
2 Ibid., 151.
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