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WILLIAM FELEPCHUK
destruction; however, a more thorough and expansive survey of the destruc¬
tion is needed to fully understand both its scale and its impact on Indigenous
and Black communities. Furthermore, preliminary research indicates that other
communities have also experienced racialized necrogeographical destruction,
including the interned Japanese on the British Columbia coast in the World
War II period." Finally, future interviews with descendants and community
leaders (such as Mike Robertson, Chief Corrina Leween, Elise Harding-Davis,
and Janie Cooper-Wilson) will offer further insight into the impact of the
destruction of burial places from the perspective of those who tend them.
The fate of the dead mirrors that of the living, and my research indicates
that in Canada, dehumanization of racialized people is not limited to the
living — the dead have faced widespread and consistent desecration, of which
Cheslatta and the Black community cemeteries of southern Ontario are but
examples. Both the burial places of the Cheslatta Carrier Nation and those
of the Black communities of the Simcoe and Windsor areas have been made
vulnerable to destruction by the poverty, dispossession, and racial exclusion
imposed on their living communities. Often, the conditions of racialization
have forced adjacent communities away from their sites, further compounding
the potential for destruction by removing those who might protect them.
Despite the scale of the destruction, the continued existence of these sites,
and of people who tend to them, is seen by many descendants and community
members as a symbol of the strength of past and present communities.
As Cooper-Wilson states, speaking of her forbears disguising their graves
to avoid body snatchers: “You've got to give it to African Canadians. Would
we have the wits and the tenacity to survive what they went through?”.®
In the words of Chief Leween of the Cheslatta Carrier Nation, in the context
of damages won by her community from the provincial government of
British Columbia: “We’re in an era right now where we can actually take
and make a success of tragedy [...] this will allow us to do that, to rebuild
our community”. Indigenous and Black communities have successfully
reconsecrated spaces of acknowledgement, remembrance, and peace through
tending to burial places long threatened with the erasure wrought by colonial
and racial dehumanization.
See, for example, William Felepchuk, Racial Necrogeographies and the Making of White
Space: The Life and Death of Nineteenth-Century Indigenous and Black Burial Places in
Rural Ontario, American Indian Culture and Research Journal, 43.2 (May 2019), 73-87.
See Vancouver Island University, VIU anthropology students and professor probe cemetery
mystery, 16 December 2010, https://news.viu.ca/viu-anthropology-students-and-professor¬
probe-cemetery-mystery (accessed 8 April 2020), and The Old Cemeteries Society of
Victoria, Obelisk — Virtual Tour of Ross Bay Cemetery, https://oldcem.bc.ca/cem/cem_rb/
em_rb_tour/obelisk/ (accessed 8 April 2020).
Naomi Norquay, ‘If we don’t try, then shame on us!’, 10.
Trumpener, Homes burned, cemetery flooded.
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