‘My responsibility’: tracing the graves of early black settlers in Canada

James Russell tries to map out a grid of the burial ground while Lezlie Harper and James’s wife Marilyn talk in the background. Photograph: Evan Saunders/Niagara Now

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.