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WILLIAM FELEPCHUK the iniguities facing both Black and Indigenous burial places and the legal protections, or lack thereof, afforded to them in the US context. Her study seeks to understand “the ready inclusion of white death and burial sites into the commons and the hesitant or refused recognition of non-white death and burial sites reveals and reflects the extent to which these lives are differently valued as a matter of both law and culture.”*° The creation, maintenance, and destruction of spaces of burial in North America is very much determined by legal regimes governing the ambiguous and intermediary status of the dead in the common law. This ambiguous status of the interred dead body has been variously defined by scholars as “both a person and a thing," as "nullius in bonis [...] no person’s property,” or as being affected by the “quasi-property”’ rights of living relatives. Rights related to the individual dead are generally invested in the living rather than the dead themselves. Furthermore, these rights tend to belong to surviving spouses and next-of-kin“ rather than to collectives or communities. These rights are not property rights, but they retain many aspects of property rights. These rights flow from a proven connection to the deceased; less direct connections that are articulated through collective belonging tend to be, but are not always, greeted with dismissiveness.* The integrity of whole cemeteries is generally protected by law in both Canadian and US contexts regardless of whether next-of-kin with a quasiproperty interest survive. This protection extends both to “live cemeteries”* as well as “old or abandoned cemeteries.” According to Arthur Street’s classic text on US cemetery law, “Graves must be regarded as sacred and be left undisturbed except for good cause. The mere fact that a grave appears to have been abandoned by surviving relatives will not justify its ruthless invasion.”“® According to Percival Jackson’s 1937 text on The Law of Cadavers and of Burial and Burial Places, places of burial are generally and universally protected from disinterment: “Disinterment is generally abhorred. Though 40 Mary L. Clark, “Treading on Hallowed Ground: Implications for Property Law and Critical Theory of Land Associated with Human Death and Burial, Kentucky Law Journal, Vol. 94 (2005), 488. “| Stroud, Law and the Dead Body, 115. 2 Alison Dundes Renteln, “The Rights of the Dead: Autopsies and Corpse Mismanagement in Multicultural Societies.”, South Atlantic Quarterly, Vol. 100, No. 4 (2001), 1006. Percival E. Jackson, The Law of Cadavers and of Burial and Burial Places, New York, Prentice-Hall, 1950, 133. 4 Renteln, The Rights of the Dead, 1006. 15 For example, see Mai-Linh K. Hong, “‘Get Your Asphalt Off My Ancestors!’: Reclaiming Richmond’s African Burial Ground”, Law, Culture and the Humanities, Vol. 13, No. 1 (2017), 81-103. ‘6 Arthur L. H. Street, American Cemetery Law: A Digest of the Cemetery Laws of all the States and Important Court Decisions, (Madison, Wisconsin: Park and Cemetery, 1922), 5. Street, American Cemetery Law, 5. 48 Tbid., 51. 43 47 + 236 +
