On a quiet weekday afternoon, James Russell knelt down in a grassy field and planted a tiny Canadian flag. When he stood up and looked around, 27 other little flags fluttered in the wind.
The site – in Niagara-on-the-Lake, on the edge of the Ontario, New York border – is a relatively nondescript parcel of land between a Subway restaurant and a white clapboard bungalow.
But nearly two centuries ago, it was the location of a Baptist church and a centre of activity for one of Canada’s earliest black communities.
At least two dozen black people are buried here: those fleeing the US through the Underground Railroad, enslaved people brought over by Loyalists during the American Revolution, black soldiers who joined the Loyalists in battle against the US, and some free people of colour who escaped an increasingly hostile American nation in the making.
But their graves are not marked, and their names are not known.
Russell argues that it’s only right to give these people a dignified burial, and their descendants a place to lay flowers. That’s why he is self-funding the use of ground-penetrating radar to locate the graves and headstones of those interred at the burial ground.
“It’s always bothered me that this just looks like a soccer field,” said Russell, a film-maker who has spent the last 37 years visiting Niagara-on-the-Lake from his home in Toronto.
“Finally, last November I said: ‘You know, no one’s going to fix this unless I fix it myself.’”
So far, the radar has found 28 potential sites. Nearly 20 more have been found by a local man who uses dousing to find graves.
“Every one of those folks have family, have grandkids or great, great-grandkids who would like to know where their ancestors are buried,” he said.
“I think it’s my responsibility, as a black person in Canada who understands the importance of not only respecting the living, but respecting the dead as well.”
Norm Arsenault, a Niagara-on-the-Lake town councillor, said he supported Russell’s work. “I’m glad to see somebody’s taking it up, because frankly, that’s just a graveyard that’s been ignored for, I don’t know, 150 years? Probably longer,” he said.
Across Canada, Indigenous communities are using ground-penetrating radar and other tools to uncover the final resting places of thousands of children who attended residential schools – institutions designed to rip children from their families and assimilate them, often through the use of violence.
In 2021, the former site of the Kamloops Indian Residential School made international news after the potential graves of more than 200 people were discovered.
Since then, hundreds more graves have been identified at the sites of former residential schools.
Uncovering the former inhabitants of historic black communities in Canada, however, has not yet been given the same urgency.
For generations, Canada has not adequately honoured its historic black communities, said Dr Afua Cooper, a historian, author and professor at Dalhousie University. She pointed to a lack of meaningful acknowledgment at the site of Priceville, Ont., where black pioneers lived in the 1800s, and at Fort Erie just south of Niagara-on-the-Lake, which was home to 18th- and 19th-century black settlements.
“For me, it speaks to the bigger issue of how invisible black history is in this country. Visible but invisible at the same time,” said Cooper.
“The history has been literally been covered up. So whether it’s that cemetery at Niagara-on-the-Lake, or it’s Africville [in Nova Scotia] or it’s Amber Valley in Alberta, what you have is this marginalization of black history,” she said.
Local historian Ron Dale said that the cemetery at Niagara-on-the-Lake was likely abandoned when black people in the area moved away in search of work.
He also warned that there is no guarantee that the buried headstones will be legible once they are excavated. He has given Russell some names of black Baptists he found in census records from the mid-1800s, in hopes that he can use them to help identify some of the names.
Lezlie Harper, a tour guide at Niagara Unbound with ancestors buried in Fort Erie, hopes what Russell is doing to help unearth black history in Canada catches on.
“We may find some amazing information about the people who were buried there,” said Harper. “Everybody says: ‘Oh, you can’t find the information.’ Yes, you can – it’s just different, and it takes time. But there’s all kinds of information out there about black folks who were here before. It’s just a matter of digging it out.”
