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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 +
