Burial Places, White Supremacy, and Racial Necrogeographies in Eastern North America

This dissertation examines how the places inhabited by the racialized dead have been threatened, destroyed, or disallowed in regimes of racialization and colonization in the territories of the Saugeen Anishinaabeg (an area colonially known as Bruce and Grey Counties, Ontario) and throughout eastern North America.In this dissertation I include the burial places of four interconnected peoples: Anishinaabe nations of the greater Great Lakes region, Black communities descended from enslaved Africans in Ontario and the Mid-Atlantic, Protestant English-speaking white populations of Ontario and the eastern United States, and Muslim communities who may be part of any of the three preceding groups, but who also comprise large numbers of late 20th century and early 21st migrants to eastern North America.This dissertation maps a variety of case studies across these communities, while remaining centred on the Anishinaabe world.I chronicle how white people have engaged in a pattern of desecration and destruction of the burial places of Indigenous and Black communities and resisted efforts by Muslims to establish space to bury their dead.White people have thus maintained the landscape of whiteness both through the destruction of existing graves and the denial of new ones.I argue first that processes of racial dehumanization and colonial dispossession have not only been inflicted on the living but also the dead and the sites they inhabit, and that this violence has its roots in traditions of posthumous dehumanization that are part of British/North American Protestant cultures while also, paradoxically, being deeply at odds with this culture's worldviews about the dead and the respect owed to them.Second, I argue that processes of colonial dispossession rooted in the removal of peoples from their lands extend to the grave itself, and that the grave is a symbol of power over a place.Thirdly, I argue that there is a wide pattern of burial place destruction across eastern North America.Finally, throughout this dissertation, I highlight the profound and magnified importance of these sites to Indigenous, Black, and Muslim communities, as evidenced by both reclamation or establishment efforts, and the presence of burial places (and instances of their destruction) in the spoken statements and the creative literatures of these communities, for whom these sites are essential connectors to threatened pasts, violent presents, and resurgent futures.52 Richard Iton, In Search of the Black Fantastic: Politics and Popular Culture in the Post-Civil Rights Era (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008), 200-1.53 Iton, In Search of the Black Fantastic, 200.54 Iton, In Search of the Black Fantastic, 200.55 Wilson, "Guest Editorial," 193.56 Iton, In Search of the Black Fantastic, 197.57 Eileen M. Luna-Firebaugh, "The Border Crossed Us: Border Crossing Issues of the Indigenous Peoples of the Americas," Wicazo Sa Review 17, no. 1 (2002): 160 58 Robbie Shilliam, The Black Pacific: Anti-Colonial Struggles and Oceanic Connections (London: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2014), 13."While Muslims, of course, do not constitute a 'race,' Islamophobia operates as racism, as evidenced by discrimination in the labor market, hate crimes, police profiling, et cetera."65 In addition to the three racialized communities discussed here, Saukiing Anishinaabekiing is also home to East Asian and Jewish communities, both of which have struggled throughout North America to keep safe the places they have established for their dead to inhabit.66 While outside the scope of my dissertation, these are important areas of inquiry that intersect with the research approaches taken here, including the sustained antisemitic attacks on 65 Mattias Gardell, "Crusader Dreams: Oslo 22.7, Islamophobia, and the Quest for a Monocultural Europe," Terrorism and Political Violence 26, no. 1 (2014): 133.66 Owen Sound is home to a historic synagogue and a longstanding Jewish community.See Stuart Laidlaw, "Answered prayers; In remarkably similar ways, blacks and Jews in Owen Sound re-establish their congregations," Toronto Star, December 2, 2006.For examples of the desecration of Jewish cemeteries around the world in the first years of the 21st century, including the 2005 attack on the Beth Israel cemetery and national historic site in Quebec City, see Canadian Press, "MPs deplore cemetery desecration," Toronto Star, May 23, 1990; Myron Love, "Winnipeg police charge five in cemetery desecration," Canadian Jewish News, August 26, 1999; Janice Mawhinney and Bruce DeMara, "Vandals' crime spree sparks outrage: Headstones toppled in Jewish cemetery -Martin promises national racism action plan," Toronto Star,

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