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UNEARTHING RACIAL NECROGEOGRAPHIES...
him be buried there.”*° There was thus a “foundational localism”* to English
burial practice and into the 19* Century dead bodies “still more or less
belonged to a place” according to tradition.”
The geographical dimension of this posthumous dehumanization often
took the form of the dreaded burial at the crossroads*® frequently reserved
for “felons of the self" those who had committed suicide. Protestants
and Catholics often reinforced their enmity by refusing to bury the other
communities dead in their own cemeteries? and the parish priest could
“allocate unfavoured corpses to the obscure north corner [of a churchyard]
in what was taken to be an unconsecrated shameful place." These traditions
parallel the geographic situation of Indigenous and Black communities whose
settlements, and thus cemeteries, were (and are) often placed at the margins
of society and of social acceptance, and thus left vulnerable to destruction.
‘The status of the dead of racialized communities is underlined by Janie Cooper¬
Wilson, who notes that “if someone feel out of grace — many illegitimate
children, or someone who ran amok of the law for whatever reason — in those
days, they were often buried on the side of the road, beyond sanctified group.
And in most Caucasian (white) cemeteries at the time, Blacks and Aboriginals
were not considered proper enough to be buried within sanctified ground.
We were heathens.”*”
In the context of the law, Ellen Stroud observes that:
[t]his is the central puzzle of the law of the dead: The human corpse is a thing, a
material object — a messy, maybe dangerous, perhaps valuable, often useful, and
always tangible thing — and the law has much to say about such things. But the
dead human body is also something very different: It is also my father, and my
friend, perhaps my child, and some day, me. For even the most secular among us,
a dead human body is at the least a very peculiar and particular kind of thing.**
Stroud further argues that “often, the dead bodies of the poor or disempowered
are the easiest to treat as things [...] the corpses of the most vulnerable will
always be the ones treated most like things. The treatment of dead bodies
[...] reflects the treatment of the living.”*? Mary L. Clark has enumerated
30 Tbid., 151.
31 Tbid., 152.
32 Ibid., 155.
33 Ibid., 149.
34 Tbid., 150.
35 Ibid., 161-162.
36 Ibid., 163.
Naomi Norquay, ‘If we don’t try, then shame on us!’, 10.
Ellen Stroud, “Law and the Dead Body: Is a Corpse a Person Or a Thing?”, Annual Review of
Law and Social Science, Vol. 14, No. 1 (2018), 117.
39 Tbid., 122.
° 235 +