Who Speaks for the Dead?

Flesherton, Ontario

While exploring the National Film Board website this summer I came across a powerful story of a community effort to restore a cemetery near Priceville Ontario, called Speakers for the Dead.  The film describes how the area was the  landing spot a community of Black veterans from the war of 1812.  They were promised land by the government, but were eventually displaced by white settlers who were given deeds to the land.

While the community was dispersed their cemetery remained, but it was not honoured by the farmers who laid claim to the land. In fact the opposite.  The gravestones were removed and used as bases in a baseball field and pavers in rough basements.   There are interviews with people who defend these desecrations as ordinary events with ‘no harm intended’.  But their claims are thin disguise for their racism.

As I watched the movie I was reminded of so many similar stories where the lack of respect for the dead mirrors a disregard for the human rights of the living.  The Truth and Reconciliation Missing Children Project  and the Huronia Regional settlement also include efforts to reinstate burial grounds.

There’s a fascinating thesis in the film that points to an underlying motive in the community to cover up, to bury, the mixed race history of the existing population. Erasing the cemetery erases the possibility that people have interracial ancestry.  There’s an article in the Washington Post that explores this further.

Cemeteries are political places that uncover the stories of the past and connect us to past and present realities of injustice.  This film is deeply disturbing.  But at the community story of resistance and reclaiming has also stayed with me and reinforced the significance of communal places to remember those who have gone before.

Speakers for the Dead on the National Film Board website
A film by Jennifer Holness and David Sutherland