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UNEARTHING RACIAL NECROGEOGRAPHIES...
Even in places where no tombstones remain, the community of the
copresent dead is of tremendous social and spiritual significance. Like the
churchyard, what often remains of such places is the “undulations of the earth
marking a community of bodies.”®° In Lakeshore, cemetery advocates note
that the “gravestones are not visible.” In another example, Harding Davis,
in a short online film, makes a sweeping gesture with her hand over the New
Canaan Cemetery, pointing to the shape of the land, suggesting the presence
of ancestors in the earth.” The fact that this community lived in this space
and continues to inhabit the ground makes it important regardless of any built
features that might remain. In this sense, mainstream heritage designations
and other markers of historical significance often do not encompass the
burial places of the marginalized, perceiving them as gone when the stones
are destroyed or removed. Cemeteries are recognizable to proponents of
white heritage because of the individuation and the physical architecture of
the graves." In the case of the Cheslatta Carrier Nation, “floodwaters have
exposed coffins in the past, and in 1952 bodies washed into the lake and were
never recovered. The lake was later consecrated as a graveyard itself”.“* The
graves lost have been so numerous, and the graveless remains so ubiquitous,
that an entire unmarked expanse of water has been consecrated a resting
place for the Cheslatta.
The work of memory of marginalized communities such as Cheslatta takes
on several forms, including the grim consecration of a lake as a gravesite.
More than a half century since the original flooding of the cemeteries by
the Kemano project, the Cheslatta people continue to tend to the remaining
graves, which are covered in small structures known as spirit houses.
Sitting atop the interred remains of relatives and ancestors, these wooden
houses are home to their spirits. When flooding periodically takes place in
the Kemano system, the Cheslatta must return to their cemeteries “for a
grim ritual, the evacuation of ‘spirit houses’ from a graveyard”.® Cheslatta
community members come together to raise the spirit houses out of the reach
of the floodwaters (today doing so with logistical support from Alcan). In
2011, Robertson noted that it is “all we can do, short of digging up graves”.
He continued: “it was an emotional time. [...] You never get used to seeing
your ancestors moved. [...] It’s pretty hard on people. That’s your grandfather
60 Laqueur, The Work of the Dead, 141.
6 CBC, Black cemetery in Lakeshore.
® Roberts, The Hidden Cemeteries of Essex County, 1:50-2:03.
® See Richard V. Francaviglia, The Cemetery as an Evolving Cultural Landscape, Annals of the
Association of American Geographers, Vol. 61, No. 3 (2010), 501-509.
Hume, Native Band rushes to save grave markets from flood waters.
65 Tbid.
66 Ibid.
64
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