Page 240 [240]
WILLIAM FELEPCHUK
“GRIM RITUAL”: THE WORK OF MEMORY AMONGST THE MARGINALIZED
In this section, I will trace how communities of the dead “forgotten and
despised” by the majority are granted “a return to life by the living as they
seek to redeem the past.”*° I argue that this work of memory is made all
the more significant by the communal nature of the sites. This is in sharp
contrast to rural amd predominantly white Canadian cemeteries, whose
significance is usually attributed to individual familial attachment. This
difference is rooted in a historical shift in the necrogeography of English
communities. In the context of the old English churchyard, which was the
predominant necrogeographical type prior to the 19"* century, Laqueur notes
that the churchyard “was and looked to be a place for remembering a bounded
community of the dead who belonged there rather than a place for individual
commemoration and mourning.”®® This tradition of communitarian burial
left the dead largely undifferentiated and unmarked, but no less significant for
the lack of names and epitaphs. As Laqueur notes, for most of British history,
a community of believers would be buried together to await resurrection.
This collective emphasis has today been replaced by the ethos of the modern
cemetery wherein individual burial plots are tended by close family and these
plots decay in both physical form and significance as time wears on and loved
ones forget or pass away.
However, in the case of the places of burial of Indigenous, Black, and
other marginalized communities, the survival of the bounded community
of the dead is connected to the historic and contemporary presence of the
living. DeMond Shondell Miller and Jason David Rivera point out that,
in New Orleans, distinctive above ground tombs are called “homes of the
dead";"" they argue that in Louisiana “the relationship that the living have
with the cemeteries makes its culture unique. The cemeteries create a sense
of place that facilitates the communion of the living and the dead through
religious and cultural activities. This underscores “the social emphasis
New Orleans’ society places on the ‘places of the dead’ in the minds of the
living." These “places of the dead” also served a central role in the collective
resilience of Black New Orleans communities in the aftermath of Hurricane
Katrina’s devastation. Like the Black communities of New Orleans, in both
southern Ontario and in the Cheslatta territory, burial places have a collective
importance to the living.
55 Laqueur, The Work of the Dead, 32.
56 Ibid., 138. (My emphasis.)
57 DeMond Shondell Miller — Jason David Rivera, Hallowed Ground, Place and Culture:
The Cemetery and the Creation of Place, Space and Culture, London, Sage Publications,
2006, 338.
58 Miller and Rivera, Hallowed Ground, 340.
59 Tbid., 349.
+ 238 "