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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 This collective emphasis has today been replaced by the ethos of the modern cemetery wherein individual burial plots are tended by close family and these plots decay in both physical form and significance as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 "
