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UNEARTHING RACIAL NECROGEOGRAPHIES...
here [...] its something that is very meaningful to me.""? Charles Nolan, another
descendant whose great-grandfather is buried in New Canaan Cemetery, noted
that “I feel the peace and, it sounds corny, but I feel the spirit”.
For Harding-Davis, a real connection between the community of the dead
and the living motivates restoration efforts: “It’s not just a spot where there’s
a marker. It’s a person that is buried there.”” The collective work of memory
is a source of joy and connection, and she remarks that: “When I come into
these cemeteries, it gladdens my heart to be able to honor my people.”’° Here
Harding-Davis is placing emphasis not on individual relatives or kin, but rather
the collective noun people, referring to her work preserving cemeteries across
the Windsor region. Harding-Davis emphasized that “they were real people
and lived a life, some of them of absolute agony [...] they risked their lives to
become free. In order to have families who could live like everyone else, equal
participation in the world. In order for them to do that today these cemeteries
have to exist”.”” The continuum here between the historic community and the
contemporary reality is yet further evidence of the essential nature of such
sites to marginalized communities. And this continuum includes the work of
interring and honouring the dead themselves: “[rjefugees ‘specifically chose
to have (their) own cemeteries [...] when we came here we made it our goal,
first to build churches because they could act as places of worship and schools
and to have our own cemeteries...So we could lovingly bury our loved ones
and take care of them after they died.””®
The work of the loving burial and continuing care continues into the present
with the work of memory, restoring those “forgotten and despised””’ by the
dominant majority and restoring them to their original place in a community
of remembrance and belonging.
In this paper I have not had space to enumerate the many countless Indigenous
places of burial that have undergone destruction and desecration across Canada,
including those flooded by hydroelectric projects. Similarly, I have been limited
in my focus on Black community burial places in the Simcoe and Windsor-areas.
Elsewhere I have focused on other sites of Indigenous and Black burial place
73 CBC, Hidden cemeteries of Essex County hold Underground Railroad history, CBC News,
1 February 2018.
7 “The Hidden Cemeteries of Essex County”. YouTube.
7 CBC, Black cemetery in Lakeshore ‘built over and neglected’, CBC News, 27 February 2015.
76 CBC, Hidden cemeteries of Essex County.
77 “The Hidden Cemeteries of Essex County”. YouTube.
78 CBC, Hidden cemeteries of Essex County.
7° Laqueur, The Work of the Dead, 32.
* 241 +