Deathscapes of Settler Colonialism: The Necro-Settlement of Stoney Creek, Ontario, Canada

This article considers the influence of burials and memorials to colonial soldiers from an earlier era on contemporary social and cultural landscapes in Canada. Through the example of a landscape centered on Smith's Knoll, a burial ground for war dead from the British-American War of 1812, it explores the process of necro-settlement: the strengthening of settler colonial claims to land based on the development of complex, meaning-laden landscapes of dead and memory. This article consists of three parts: The first situates geographical studies of deathscapes alongside theories about settler colonialism through intersecting discourses of land use. The second includes a settler colonial microhistorical geography of Smith's Knoll and the local deathscape that surrounds it. The third section draws on this case study to reveal new perspectives on the role of burial and memorial in settler colonial place-making and the erasure of Indigenous histories and peoples.

I n 1889, in the town of Saltfleet-a hamlet on the shores of Lake Ontario, Canada, later renamed Stoney Creek-a local farmer plowing his field turned up a number of long-dead bodies. Identified by fragments of buttons, tools, and badges, these bodies were found to be those of several soldiers, war dead from the relatively minor and often forgotten British-American War of 1812. The spot where the farmer found these bodies-a low, flat hill called Smith's Knoll-had clearly been used as a battlefield burial site, although no official records of this existed. Local authorities, alerted to the discovery of the battlefield graves, consecrated Smith's Knoll as a cemetery and in 1908 installed a stone monument topped with a British lion and emblazoned with a Union Jack (see Figure 1). The landscape thus marked with symbols of colonial memory and military honor, the site again faded into obscurity for a century until a rededication ceremony in 2000. Far from being an inert part of the landscape, though, this cemetery and memorial became a key site in the formation of the identities of many people living in the area, myself included.
Smith's Knoll is at the center of a particular landscape that, I argue here, forms an important material and cultural foundation for the ongoing settler colonization of the region. Colonization in this context refers to the violent and supposedly irreversible transfer of lands from Indigenous polities to a burgeoning settler colonial society: what was founded as British North America and is now called Canada. The battle that resulted in the bodies being interred at Smith's Knoll was not a battle between European and Indigenous adversaries (although both were involved in the battle) but between British and U.S. forces, and in the sweep of history it is relatively insignificant. The changes that have been marked onto the landscape because of this battle, however, are reflective of pervasive settler colonial cultures of selective remembrance and forgetting and can tell us a great deal about how settler people-like myself-come to identify with the places we call home, displacing Indigenous claims and counterhistories. In this article, I seek to demonstrate how my own settler community attaches to the place of Stoney Creek in part through the materialization of a complex deathscape-a landscape marked by cemeteries, burial sites, and memorials to the dead-that both reflects and reinforces settler colonialism's claims to land and belonging.
Settler colonialism as a distinct formation and practice (Veracini 2014) is premised on the imposition of a false temporal barrier dividing two periods: before settlement, a state defined by terra nullius and terrifying wilderness, and after settlers arrive with their intent to stay, 1 bringing with them "civilization" and new practices of land use. Yet, this is a false temporal barrier, existing only in the perception of colonizers and newcomers, and it is troubled by an undeniable fact: The land was not empty prior to colonial incursion but was occupied by many sophisticated Indigenous societies. The histories of Indigenous peoples and their continued presence on the land in the present deeply trouble and "unsettle" settler societies (Regan 2010). As such, settler societies are often observed to reshape the land around them, attempting to obliterate markers of a past that do not conform to settler historical narratives. This article examines one example of this reshaping to expose quotidian life in Stoney Creek as part of this process of settler colonial memorialization and forgetting. I assert that, through the example of Smith's Knoll and the wider deathscape around it, we can observe the workings of settler colonial cultural and material production through the way that the bodily remains and social memories of dead settlers or colonial agents are inscribed on the land, a process I refer to as necro-settlement. The first section situates geographical studies of deathscapes alongside theories of settler colonialism through intersecting discourses of land use. The second section includes a settler colonial "microhistorical geography" of the cemetery at Smith's Knoll and the local deathscape that surrounds it. The third section draws on this case study to reveal new perspectives on the role of burial and memorial in settler colonial place making and the erasure of Indigenous histories and peoples. In the Conclusion, I sketch out the importance of understanding transfer through necrosettlement.

Method and Framework
The research for this article is rooted in a placebased autoethnography (Butz and Bessio 2009) (Veracini 2008), a social remembering in which settler cultures and histories are projected onto a place as a hegemonic narrative that obscures and displaces Indigenous histories and, by informing ongoing colonial acts, Indigenous bodies. As a self-identifying settler, 2 and much like all settler people, I was both unwittingly recruited into and also deeply complicit with the ongoing production of this false history. I had become aware that my own memory and history of my home was both incomplete and partially false and decided that I needed to undertake a phenomenological exploration 3 of my hometown to begin filling in the blanks. Through this, I began to understand how the settler colonial landscape had been created, what it obscured, and how it shaped the identities of settler people like myself.
As I explored and photographed many areas of Stoney Creek, I was repeatedly drawn to Battlefield Park and Smith's Knoll and to several cemeteries in the area that I frequently passed by. These places are very familiar to me, mere minutes on foot from my childhood home, and as an undergraduate I spent summers working for municipal parks maintenance out of Battlefield Park. I recalled a time in the summer of 2000, when a curious event took place to which I bore witness: On June 4, 2000 . . . the battlefield cemetery was reopened as a national historic site during a special rededication memorial service. American military pallbearers from the Third United States Infantry, Fort Meyers, Virginia, took part in the reinterment ceremony for soldiers killed in the battle. At the rededication ceremony, the remains of approximately twenty-three soldiers killed were placed into a wooden crate and then reinterred into the locally made new crypt. (Carstens and Sanford 2012, 82) I watched this rededication ceremony, then cleaned up the park after the celebrants left. I was given a commemorative coin, thanking me for my professional service during the event, which I displayed proudly. Beyond displaying this small token, though, I rarely thought about the event again for many years until my encounters with theories of settler colonialism gave it new significance. Looking at the same spaces again in 2014, it occurred to me that while I was seeking to understand the role of settler people in colonizing this place through their everyday practices, I had ignored the possibility of settler bodies continuing to colonize after their deaths. This prompted me to begin an interrogation of the intersections of settler colonization and the creation of deathscapes.

Deathscapes and Theories of Settler Colonialism
Deathscapes encompass a wide range of landscape features associated with death and burial, including cemeteries, mass graves, and official and unofficial memorials. Consistent with most geographical literature on this topic, I use deathscapes to refer to a variety of cemeteries, burial markers, and both permanent and temporary public memorials to the dead. Deathscapes are part of the landscape, in that they often appear as a conspicuous alteration of the environment but invested with particular spatialities, cultural meanings, and embodied practices. As Maddrell and Sidaway (2012) described, sites of burial and memorial "intersect and interact with other moments and topographies, including those of sovereignty (sovereigntyscapes), memory (memory-scapes) and work, life and beauty (landscapes)" (5). Kong's (1999) landmark article, "Cemeteries and Columbaria, Memorials and Mausoleums," calls for greater geographical engagement with deathscapes, including the series of questions that she poses to prompt spatial analysis: How are some meanings conspicuous by their absence in landscapes? Which are the groups whose ideas and values do not find translation in landscapes, whether for their living or dead? What are the relations of domination and subordination that submerge the landscapes (and deathscapes) of some groups? (Kong 1999, 8) These questions of presence and absence, ideas and values, and domination and subordination remain important.
Deathscapes have been examined most extensively in colonial spaces through attention to the displacement of Indigenous bodies and disruption of Indigenous grave sites by colonizers (e.g., Thomas 2000;Highet 2005;Roy 2006). Framing deathscapes in conjunction with settler colonialism, however, formulated as a unique form of colonization (Veracini 2015), is comparatively lacking in consideration. Settler colonial frameworks are increasingly important tools for geographers and are being used in important interventions in a number of fields. Historical geographers, such as Lester (2012), Barman (2010), and Edmonds (2010), have all critically engaged with settler colonial theories, but contemporary geographers are also finding utility in working with settler colonialism as a framework. 4 Settler colonialism plays a significant and distinct role in shaping narratives of memory in settler societies such as Canada. Yet there is little attention given to what it means for the settler colonizer to encounter the graves of fellow settlers or, more important, what role the spaces of settler deathscapes serve in propping up the larger settler colonial endeavor.
I turn here to a brief outline of some relevant theories of settler colonialism. Studies of settler colonialism have emerged as an important, dynamic, and at times conflicted field of multi-and interdisciplinary inquiry (Macoun and Strakosch 2013) that has increasingly helped to reveal important perspectives on states such as Canada, Australia, the United States, and other settler societies. Theories, concepts, and arguments critiquing settler colonialism have shifted how the geographies of settler states are understood. Political theorist Veracini (2010a) has made a number of contributions to this field, including his extension of Gregory's concept of imagined geographies of colonialism to the settler colonial context. He elsewhere developed a list of twenty-six separate transfers, methods by which land is claimed by settler collectives, dispossessing Indigenous peoples in the process (Veracini 2010b). These two concepts provide an important starting point for understanding settler colonial geographies. Veracini's list of transfers, although extensive, is not exhaustive. Given the shape-shifting nature of colonialism (Alfred and Corntassel 2005), it is important to continue to think through different ways in which transfer can occur to expose ongoing colonization and prevent disavowal of the settler colonial present.
Deathscapes are often marked by physical alterations on the landscape in the form of memorial structures, whether denoting individual graves or larger sites of remembrance. Kong (1999) discussed studies of "memorials as political landscapes which contribute to the construction of the national collective memory . . . [which argue] commemoration is selective and reflects what society wants to remember. Hence, memorials are a visual effort to orchestrate the collective memory of particular wars" (6) or other political and social narratives. In settler states, political and social narratives are often directed toward enacting or justifying transfers of land. Transfer has been articulated in settler colonial analyses as the functional and immediate goal of settlement: the removal of Indigenous belonging on the land in every sense-essentially the destruction of Indigenouss identity-and its replacement with settler belonging or claim and ultimately settler nativism. This is a process of building colonial "structures of invasion" (Wolfe 1999) or social dynamics that displace or replace Indigenous ways of being.
Settler colonialism, by definition, seeks to obscure "the conditions of its own production" (Veracini 2010b, 14). Despite the violence and intentionality of settler colonial transfers, settler colonization is accompanied by narratives of "nonencounter" with Indigenous peoples, generating a "historyless" settler polity that disavows responsibility for the impacts of colonization (Veracini 2007;Freeman 2010). Settler colonialism's trajectory is ultimately toward transcendence: "indigenization" of the settler self that erases from memory the illegitimacy of claims to belonging that rely on colonialism and the violence of dispossession and land transfer (Veracini 2010b;Barker 2013). This transcendence would, if achieved, foreclose the debate on settler colonial belonging as only the settler colonial narrative would remain, and ultimately settlement would "end" in triumph for the settlers. This end goal of permanent and irrevocable transfer of land is pursued through a three-part process that involves the simultaneous colonizing acts of occupation, erasure, and bricolage (Barker 2013). These acts, although interrelated, are carried out in different ways and at different times, often by a variety of imperial and colonial agents.
Settler colonial occupation is often taken to mean the founding of settlements and homesteads. It certainly involves this, but occupation is not simply a matter of being in place. Occupation is dependent on measuring, mapping, and drawing boundaries, rooted in the ability to scientifically break place into separate elements and reposition those elements in settler systems of knowledge (Soguk 2011;Bhandar 2016;Mackey 2016). For example, "wilderness" might be protected as national park space, such as Banff (Canada) or Yellowstone (U.S.) national parks, incorporating these places into settler geometries of power not because they are occupied but to serve as a reminder that they potentially could be (Banivanua Mar 2010). Thus, occupation is to some extent irrespective of actual physical settlement; what matters is whether or not a place is occupied in the settler colonial imagination. Settlers consider a place occupied when it can be visualized as filled with the markers of settler society, and this can include industrial development and extractive industries that, although not necessitating settlement of the time envisioned when one thinks of prairie homesteaders or other "traditional" settlers, marks the land as being owned, belonging to, and being used by settler people. Preston's (2013) paper on the Canadian tar sands as a settler colonial space is prescient here. As she pointed out, and crucial to my study, settler people need only move through and interact with (and profit from) the land to consider it subsumed into the larger network of settler colonial spaces, shared between state and corporate claims on behalf of all Canadians.
Erasure facilitates many other acts of settler claiming and place making through the removal of Indigenous being on the land, even from history, memory, and culture. This can even be accomplished without the removal of Indigenous bodies, although the actual murder and genocide of Indigenous peoples-"necropolitical transfer" (Veracini 2010b, 35)-is a pervasive feature of settler colonialism. More specifically, erasure seeks the elimination of Indigenous peoples as functional nations and cultures. The goal of erasure is the reconciliation of colonial difference 5 through the production of a desired or expected res nullius or terra nullius (Tully 2000;MacMillan 2011), an empty land that, if not actually empty, is at least open: to the entrance of settlers, to being reshaped, to the extraction of profit, and to the creation of structures of state governance. It is easy and not uncommon to ascribe settler peoples the role of occupation while attributing erasure to a combination of "just war" by state and imperial paramilitary forces and uncontrollable diseases like smallpox or influenza, washing settler hands of responsibility.
Settler people do not necessarily intend to completely destroy and replace indigeneity through erasure and occupation. Rather, they often seek to preserve particular, decontextualized elements of indigeneity as a form of primitive accumulation particular to settler colonialism (Mackey 1999). These elements form both the physical and conceptual bases of settler colonial space. This is the settler colonial "bricolage" 6 : a synthetic collection of elements of indigeneityincluding appropriated material culture like totem poles and dreamcatchers, aped versions of ceremonies (Aldred 2000), and claims to relationship or descent (Leroux 2015)-and metropole cultural "fragments" (Butlin 2009), organized and contextualized to give meaning as part of settler spaces. This bricolage changes over time, involving a constantly evolving "legend of the present" (Stevenson 2012, 593). Bruyneel (2016)  Taken together, the framework of occupation, erasure, and bricolage guided my own sense of place, home, and identity as a suburban, white setter. Despite constantly interacting with spaces so crucial to Indigenous history in the area, my childhood was largely absent contact with Indigenous peoples or histories. I was vaguely aware of the Six Nations reserve-the nearest "official" First Nations community-and I knew some names like Iroquois and Cree. I had no idea whose territory I lived on or even that Indigenous people might be anything other than a minority within the multicultural Canadian nation. I believed wholeheartedly that Canada was my "home and native land," as our anthem proclaims. Knowing that others were raised as I was, and still are, inspired this reexamination of my own place-based identity to understand some of the ways in which settler colonialism shapes and limits the perceptions of the people from my hometown and how that is written onto the landscape in material forms.

Shallow Roots: The Deathscapes around Smith's Knoll
It is necessary to undertake sustained critical investigations of visible manifestations of settler colonialism because specific and particular acts of Indigenous erasure, occupation of land, and construction of material and cultural colonial bricolage are often obscured behind larger or longer term narratives. This is how the "historylessness" of settler colonies is maintained: Master narratives inscribed in material landscapes assert whitewashed colonial pasts that obscure both what was done to secure the lands that became Canada and the ongoing struggles by Indigenous communities to win back those lands. The War of 1812, I argue, serves as one of those narratives for many people born and raised in the region: The colonization and settlement of places like Stoney Creek are subsumed into the wider sweep of struggles for and against British imperial hegemony, contestations over early U.S. liberalism, the formation of multiple distinct national identities, the celebration of hardy pioneers and homesteaders, and similar narratives that overdetermine settler perceptions of how and why we come to be where we are.
That was certainly my experience as a child growing up in the region, several times a year commemorating imperialist events like Victoria Day (a Canadian national holiday in May to celebrate the birthday of Queen Victoria), nationalist events like Canada Day (1 July), or the reenactment of the Battle of Stoney Creek, all of which were marked by huge displays of fireworks in Battlefield Park. Returning to these sites as an adult, I have been determined to focus on a very different kind of place-based history: one that tells a story of colonial betrayal and erasure and ongoing struggles for justice by Indigenous nations that demand that we rethink what was and is celebrated in places like Smith's Knoll and Battlefield Park. This intervention is inspired in part by the work of historian Black (2015), who argued for the importance of "microhistories" of settler colonialism, which have the potential to disrupt established settler colonial narratives and expose how processes of naming, mapping, and material transformations of the land (e.g., road building) enforce settler authority on the land. Following Black's work, this section pursues a microhistorical geography of Smith's Knoll and the proximate cemeteries and monuments that form a deathscape in and around Stoney Creek, exposing the particular ways in which the material deathscape underpins narratives of settler colonial belonging.
To understand what is meant by shallow roots in this context, it is important to understand the ways in which the land has been changed through the process of colonial settlement. 7 Prior to the encroachment of settler populations, the lands discussed here were part of the overlapping territories of the Haudenosaunee Confederacy and Anishnaabe nations, whose roots in the area are far deeper and thicker. This region was layered with political agreements and arrangements, imbricated systems of law and governance, markers of cultural production, and material bases of incredibly resilient and flexible Indigenous economies (Hill 2017). The Haudenosaunee and Anishnaabe relationship was in part defined by an important treaty agreement, the Gdoo-naaganinaa ("Our Dish" in Anishnaabe), which articulates a multinational, shared Indigenous sovereignty in this area that predates the assertion of Canadian sovereignty (Simpson 2008). From the 1600s onward, the Haudenosaunee Confederacy also signed a separate series of treaties, with associated wampum belts as records, with European nations and emergent settler states, creating a complex overlapping network of diplomacy and belonging that included a wide diversity of peoples (Monture 2014;Hill 2017).
When early settlers arrived to the area, they would not have found an area of "pristine" wilderness but rather an area criss-crossed by boundary lines, transportation routes, and extensive cultivation. Further, Indigenous people were prized as military allies by all imperial powers competing for footholds on the land, and the Haudenosaunee and Anishnaabe, like many peoples, shifted alliances to counter and manipulate imperial ambitions. The settling of differences between Britain and the United States following the War of 1812, however, meant that neither colonial power in this area had the impetus to continue respecting Haudenosaunee autonomy. No more war meant no more need for allies and eventually the agreement on a permanent border that deeply divided Indigenous nations. The War of 1812 has been described by Taylor (2010) as a civil war, which neither Britain nor the United States decisively won but Indigenous people most definitely lost. This war, fought on land from Kentucky and Michigan in the southwest to Montreal and the St. Lawrence River in the northeast and featuring naval engagements around the Atlantic and Gulf Coast, came to a head in what would become Stoney Creek, less than a kilometer from where my family home would be built nearly two centuries later.
The Battle of Stoney Creek was not the decisive battle in the War of 1812-the war ended in 1814 without a truly decisive moment-but it was among the last major engagements of the war and also marked the farthest that U.S. forces penetrated into British territory. On the evening of 5 June 1813, the Americans set up camp at Gage Farm, adjacent to the road on which they had been marching, and set up their cannons on what is now Smith's Knoll. Warned of an impending attack, a small British force accompanied by an even smaller group of Haudenosaunee warriors attacked the U.S. encampment during the night, capturing valuable artillery pieces, as well as two U.S. generals, and causing the remaining U.S. forces to flee. 8 The knoll where the U.S. cannons had been placed was turned into a battlefield burial ground (City of Hamilton 2005) and then forgotten for decades until the fateful discovery by a nineteenth-century farmer, mentioned at the beginning of this article.
Today, Smith's Knoll is entangled with three other proximate places to form a distinct deathscape. The first of these related sites is Battlefield Park, across the street from Smith's Knoll, and the location of Battlefield House Museum, the former Gage farmhouse. More than the old farmhouse, though, the park is dominated by a massive Gothic revival faux castle, a monument to the British Empire and to the dead of the War of 1812, which each summer overlooks a reenactment of the Battle of Stoney Creek that draws historical reenactors from across Ontario and the United States as well as thousands of tourists. The monument has been modified over the years to include plaques honoring local dead from the World Wars and is fronted by two enormous cannons-representing the cannons captured from the U.S. forces by the British during their decisive nighttime raid-reminding visitors that people both died and killed for this land. 9 Nearby, two cemeteries are positioned as differently important sites in this deathscape. The first, Stoney Creek Cemetery, stands less than a kilometer from Smith's Knoll, and although it is no longer "active," it remains a protected space of historical significance in part because it hosts the body of "War of 1812 Hero" Billy Green, as well as many of the bodies of soldiers killed in the Battle of Stoney Creek (City of Hamilton 2005). Slightly further, just over 3.5 kilometers down the road from Smith's Knoll, is Bartonville Cemetery. This cemetery remains active, and although it does not have direct connections to the War of 1812 or Smith's Knoll, it is a temporal analogue to the others, founded only ten years after the close of the war, in 1824. These two cemeteries are not examined in detail in this study but provide an important framing of the situation of Smith's Knoll and Battlefield Park in the wider regional deathscape.
I turn here to the work of Rugg (2002), whose study helped to define several key characteristics of deathscapes and also differentiated cemeteries from mass graves, war cemeteries, and pantheons. An examination of the characteristics that Rugg ascribed to these spaces shows that Smith's Knoll does not fit neatly into any of these categories and that its resonance with both quotidian cemeteries and pantheons nearby as sites of cultural memory and myth making is indicative of particular settler colonial logics. First, Rugg (2002) established a cemetery as "more than an ad hoc site in which the disposal of human remains has taken place: its purpose as a site of burial has been formally defined. Furthermore, the site has been so constituted that ritual-customary religious, ethnic and cultural funeral practices-can be readily accommodated" (260). In this, Smith's Knoll certainly qualifies as demonstrated by both its official designation as a cemetery and the ceremony and ritual of the reinterrment of the U.S. soldiers described earlier.
Smith's Knoll also meets Rugg's criteria of having an observable boundary, as a stone wall on one side and wrought iron railings on the other sides divide this space from the surrounding suburban landscape. One of the primary characteristics that define cemeteries, however-the provision of spaces for the memorialization of individuals-is absent from Smith's Knoll: Cemeteries . . . offer the possibility of, and a context for, memorializing a particular individual: the identity of the deceased can be enshrined in the site's internal order. Implicit in the landscaping of a cemetery is the ability of users to locate a specific grave . . . internally, the site will be divided by roads and paths: each grave will have an established "address." (Rugg, 2002, 262) Whereas the nearby Stoney Creek and Bartonville cemeteries both house individual graves, more or less in ordered rows, Smith's Knoll is absent any specific, individual burial site. The only differentiation that is made is between British and U.S. war dead, and that has only been done relatively recently. Although it is not unusual in some settler societies to go to great lengths to identify war dead (e.g., Israel; see Weiss 2008), this task has never been taken up with the bodies at Smith's Knoll beyond determining nationality by clothing and similar archaeological markings.
Similarly, Rugg (2002) defined war cemeteries as having an internal order and individual graves, with one famous example being Arlington National Cemetery in Virginia (arlingtoncemetery.mil). The notable difference between these spaces and civic cemeteries is "the dead buried in war cemeteries are unlikely to be local to the area: they may come from another country or indeed another continent. As a consequence, the site may be visited by war veterans and family members who may undertake long journeys to pay their respects and make sense of their loss" (Rugg 2002, 270). Although it is true that the soldiers buried on Smith's Knoll did in some cases come from far away, without individuating between the bodies, it is impossible to tell professional soldiers recruited in Britain apart from local militia or soldiers enlisted in the colonies, blurring the lines between local and foreign, settlement and metropole.
Historically, Smith's Knoll would have been more properly defined as a mass grave, with "the boundaries of the site . . . hastily erected, incomplete or even totally absent" (Rugg 2002, 268). Following the official designation as a cemetery in 1908 and subsequent installation of the monument and boundaries, however, Smith's Knoll is definitively no longer simply a mass grave. This is significant because mass graves are often "a means of remembering catastrophe . . . rather than as a place to commemorate individuals" (Rugg, 2002, 268). In none of the markers on Smith's Knoll, at Battlefield Park, or Battlefield Monument, or in fact in any of the literature on the Battle of Stoney Creek, is the event remembered as a "catastrophe"-not even for the retreating Americans. The park information boards rather uphold the bravery of the British soldiers and the fortitude of Sara Calder, a turn-ofthe-century member of the Women's Wentworth Historical Society who is largely credited with the location and construction of Battlefield Monument. In fact, during my time working at Battlefield Park, I always remember the battle itself being portrayed through reenactments in an almost festive manner, as a relatively insignificant battle with few casualties. The community of (almost exclusively white settler) reenactors were jovial, and most folks were friends, as if this were somehow representative of the actual historical experience.
Given the lack of individual memorialization and lack of catastrophic remembrance, Smith's Knoll appears increasingly to bear resemblance to a pantheon: "A monument or building commemorating a nation's dead heroes," the pantheon carries strong political purpose as a celebration of nationhood. It is not always the case that the pantheon contains actual interments . . . the pantheon transcends the local context, and is usually owned and maintained by the state. The site can often have political significance. Generally, the site is sacred because of the presence of the illustrious dead. (Rugg 2002, 271) Nearby Battlefield Monument (Figure 2) very clearly fills this purpose. Surrounded by a large park, and clearly billed by municipal authorities as a tourist site (official signs directing travelers toward Battlefield Park dot the local highways), the monument was purpose-built to celebrate the War of 1812 and the Battle of Stoney Creek as significant moments in the evolution of the Canadian nation and also its connection to Victorian imperial ideals. Clearly this is a key site in the production of local memory, with both pantheons and cemeteries in close proximity.

Banal Deathscapes: Boundaries in Time and Space
Smith's Knoll, Battlefield Park, and Stoney Creek and Bartonville cemeteries occupy space on the land as well as in the colonial imagination in a way that foregrounds settler colonization as valorous and worthy of remembering, while obscuring Indigenous histories of this place. In effect, this deathscape represents an attempt to fix shallow settler colonial roots in a particular place by monopolizing the landscape and cultural discourse about the meaning and production of these sites. This is pursued through the generation of tropes of nationalism and militarism through the material spaces of pantheons, while also drawing on the banality and solemn attribution of cemetery spaces.
Settler colonial spaces are often portrayed as banal and everyday (Berg 2011;Rifkin 2013). This includes battlefields, cemeteries, and other memorial sites that are simultaneously special and ubiquitous. My school classmates and I frequently visited the battlefield site and pioneer re-creations at the nearby museum as part of courses in history, geography, social studies, and sometimes just as a special trip. Although we were aware of the martial history of the place, it was presented in a sanitized, almost fanciful manner-there was little hint of the terror and violence of imperial warfare or of the pain of dispossession and dislocation imposed on Indigenous people in the process of settler nation building. In a landscape that should obviously be associated with combat and death-decorated by cannons and fake fortifications and draped in many places with the Union Jackwe never discussed it as anything but lighthearted pioneer history, versions of which were shared by most Canadians (or so we believed).
Despite this banality, deathscapes such as that which has coalesced around Smith's Knoll, Battlefield Monument, and the nearby active and closed cemeteries generate a bricolage of memory and story essential to settler colonial narratives. This passage from the Hamilton Heritage guide represents the way in which banal cemetery deathscapes serve to root contemporary settler people to the land by materially linking present and past occupation of place: Part of the interest that cemetery markers possess comes from the documentation incorporated on the stone itself. Cemeteries provide resource materials that are an important component of Canadian Social History. . . . Markers often contain inscriptions and motifs reflecting the views and faith of early citizens of the town and countryside. (City of Hamilton, 2005, 16) As one example, let us return to Bartonville Cemetery, which features an official historical plaque at the front (south side), adjacent to the entrance, emblazoned with the crest of the City of Hamilton and detailing the history of the church community that originally founded it. The plaque reads in part: This plaque presents a stereotypical settler colonial history: Brave pioneers (occupation) build civilized structures (bricolage) like churches in a blank wilderness (erasure). Christian faith is portrayed as synonymous with civilization and also normalized at the root of Canadian culture; this is especially important to consider in the light of the later role of Christian churches in the residential school system (Regan 2010). 11 Likewise, settlement is conceptually separated from Indigenous genocide and from the systems of imperial servitude that brought many people to Canada over the same time period as the founding of Pioneer Memorial. Populations simply grow, with no mention of forced migration or of displacement of Indigenous peoples and so no need to justify further territorial expansion and social construction. Consequently, these initial "pioneering" acts-the founding of a church and graveyard-are memorialized in a founding narrative steeped in nonencounter. Settler folks like myself have passed this sign, read it, and understood it as the true historical narrative of that site for decades. This story is sedimented, forming layers of sociocultural assumptions about the history and importance of this place, what Wolfe (1999) referred to as a settler colonial palimpsest. This palimpsest is both material, as more and more markers of memory are erected around this deathscape over time, and conceptual, as generation after generation of settler Canadian identities in this region are informed by the spatialities created through and with this deathscape.
The founding narrative of settler colonialism, as generally laid out on the Bartonville signage, is given weight and permanence through materialization in the form of a cemetery because of the ways that people perceive cemetery spaces as sacred "in so far as the site is 'regarded with respect'" (Rugg 2002, 264). This makes some sense for cemeteries such as Bartonville where active burials still occur; somewhat less so (and decreasingly over time) for Stoney Creek cemetery, which is closed to burials. It does not hold at all for a cemetery such as Smith's Knoll, where both the lack of individual graves at which to grieve and the extreme length of time since the burials mean that there is a significant lack of bereaved to protect. Yet, Smith's Knoll continues to assert a demand for solemn respect: Although it is common to see family activities around Battlefield Monument and the surrounding park, I have always known Smith's Knoll to be far less used, evidence of subtle social messaging about the importance and sacredness of the site.
Generally, the creation of a cemetery is the creation of an inviolable space, both because of cultural and social protocols and prohibitions around cemeteries, and through the formal regimes that delineate and govern cemetery spaces (Maddrell and Sidaway 2012). Both these formal and informal approaches serve to protect settler deathscapes from undue interference, creating spatial and temporal boundaries by framing spaces to endlessly celebrate the settler nation and also pinning the War of 1812 and the Battle of Stoney Creek as pivotal and-this is key-originary historical events. As the Battle of Stoney Creek as a historical event becomes portrayed as the birth of a place in the settler colonial imaginary, the origin story for the region helps to support the erasure of the thriving Indigenous landscape that early settlers would have encountered, establishing the screen memory that allows for settler claims to nonencounter. It also serves to obscure the ongoing resistance of Indigenous peoples to colonial displacement through literature, historical and anthropological research, and political activism. 12 Various social organizations, churches, and layers of government cooperate to administer the spaces that support this screen memory as exclusive and exclusionary spaces. 13 Zoning as a formal practice of planning and informal zoning-such as the specification of cemeteries based on ethnicity or religion, separate sections of cemeteries for infant and child bodies, or the creation of family-specific crypts-combine to create spaces of layered but highly exclusive meaning. As Rugg (2002) pointed out, in the United Kingdom and North America (unlike many other places), graves in cemeteries are not reused and the body in the grave carries a right of possession, guaranteeing that "graves would never be disturbed and the remains would stay intact" (262). Contesting the "rights" of the dead to rest in peace is seen as transgressive. Exhuming bodies even for inquests and criminal investigations is a traumatic act, as the spatial boundary of the cemetery is meant to be one way: You go in, but you don't come out. The discovery of soldiers' bodies in a mass grave at the end of the nineteenth century initiated an immediate and unquestioned transfer of land in the settler colonial imaginary geography, as those lands became inherently sanctified by the glorious dead interred there, serving to displace the territorial claims of the Haudenosaunee or Anishnaabe peoples.
Even as Stoney Creek Municipal Cemetery has ceased to serve as a place to put new bodies, it is unthinkable that it would be discontinued from serving the function of honoring the bodies already interred there-war dead from the Battle of 1812 and other early civic figures are buried there. One can assume that Bartonville Cemetery will one day reach the same critical mass, becoming an inert space, a settler colonial ballast. Demarcating space is both a product of settler occupation and a way of asserting it, and so protections for settler deathscapes-such as the protection of cemetery and memorial spaces through heritage legislation, including the Ontario Heritage Act that protects Smith's Knoll-assert a very real occupation of space by settler colonial power, even in the absence of living settler people.
Settler society cannot hope to compete against Indigenous claims to land on the grounds of duration, so instead they compete on grounds of materiality (Bruyneel 2007). Settler deathscapes become prized as collections of dates, as proof of long-term tenure of the land. Settler people in Canada, as in many other settler colonial societies, are haunted by the unanswerable question: If this is your land, where are your stories (Chamberlin 2003; see also Deloria 2003)? It seems that settler people must die, be interred, be memorialized, and, ultimately, be forgotten-as the individual soldiers at Smith's Knoll were and as many of the people interred at Stoney Creek Cemetery are currently being forgotten-so that they can be resurrected as part of a mythic nonencounter origin story that serves to displace Indigenous connections to the land. When a hundred years after the fact, the bodies of soldiers are "discovered," it is used to lend weight to an important "deep colonizing" timeline (Veracini 2011). Settlers assert this historical weight through numbers-how many years a family has been in place, how long since first settlement, how long a settler lived, how many children they had, how many men died in a battle-which are further given cultural mass by their material carving into stone and other monuments. For people like myself, whose family tenure on the land goes back no further than the mid-twentieth century, association with these places through linkages of home and belonging allowed me to attach my own identity to these deep colonizing narratives despite my relative newness on the land.

Militarism, Nationalism, and Settler Deathscapes
Returning to Taylor's analysis that the War of 1812 represents a definitive "loss" for Indigenous peoples, the landscape of the region around Smith's Knoll changed rapidly and drastically in ways that inscribed settler dominance on the land itself. After the war, Stoney Creek, like much of the Great Lakes Region, went from being lightly settled by Europeans to being increasingly covered by homesteads and villages. So it is that the settler colonization of Stoney Creek and Hamilton is inseparable from the history of imperial warfare and violent death in the War of 1812 that made this colonialism possible. Maddrell and Sidaway (2012) acknowledged that battlefields play a key role in many kinds of deathscapes, noting "that the notion of deathscapes cannot be causally invoked without also conjuring with war, destruction, violence and genocide. . . . With time, battlefields (of all kinds) become caught up in other narratives" (6). As such, the deathscapes of Stoney Creek and Hamilton are an interwoven collection of banal burial sites and militaristic memorials, all of which are caught up in displacing Haudenosaunee and Anishnaabe presence.
Smith's Knoll is one of only three cemeteries in Hamilton designated for protection under the Ontario Heritage Act "solely on their merit as cemeteries" (City of Hamilton 2005, 3). The burials are significant because they honor war dead and because the bodies are old; they predate Canada itself as an entity. This is a feature that Smith's Knoll shares in common with both Stoney Creek Municipal Cemetery and Bartonville Cemetery, and Stoney Creek Cemetery is cited as particularly noteworthy in the Hamilton Heritage guide for its 1812 connections (City of Hamilton 2005). Meanwhile, Bartonville Cemetery, with no connection to the Battle of Stoney Creek, instead boasts an explicitly militaristic and nationalist marker: a massive sign proclaiming honor to the dead of World Wars I and II, Korea, and United Nations peacekeeping missions (see Figure 3). At Smith's Knoll, the imperial lion that tops the stone monument and the replica cannons installed at the site link an overt militarism and imperialism to a solemn, respectful space (see Figure 1). Sites like Smith's Knoll and Battlefield Monument do not need specific name markings to evoke a past that settler people in the present can look on with pride and patriotism. As Johnston and Ripmeester (2009) wrote, monuments to war dead resonate with "patriotism, courage and duty" to "evoke tales of valour" (422). Veracini (2010b) asserted that settler collectives see themselves as special and distinct from their imperial forbearers by right of "residency in a special locale" (55). I argue that the memorialization of heroically, tragically dead masculine settlers serves as material reinforcement of the "special" nature of the places that settlers occupy and, as such, also as justification that they are meant to occupy these places. The mixture of their bodies with the soil makes the place special. Deloria (2003), quoting Chief Luther Standing Bear, located ongoing colonial anxiety in the preoccupation that the soil itself is made from generations of Indigenous people, whereas the settler "tree of life" has not yet "grasped the soil" of these lands, an anxiety mixed with ever-present fear of violent Indigenous retaliation (60). Spaces like the deathscape centered on Smith's Knoll must be seen as the material product of attempts to address this anxiety. Rugg (2002) noted that pantheons and war cemeteries might be used for particular, nationalistic purposes, which should inform considerations of events kicked off in 2010, when a new host of bodies, also soldiers killed in the Battle of Stoney Creek, was found on and adjacent to a private property connected to Battlefield Park. An article in The Toronto Star newspaper, stumping for public funds to rebury the remains alongside those at Smith's Knoll, quoted a local politician who reinforced the nationalist narrative of the settler deathscape. Paul Miller, member of Provincial Parliament, paradoxically asserted that "If the British hadn't won that battle-it was the pivotal battle of the war-if we hadn't won it, we would probably be flying the American flag in Ontario right now" (Coyle 2010, italics added). The article went on to assert that "the young men of 1812 were the first Canadians" and deserving of "proper respect." 14 There are two falsehoods here: first, claiming the bodies as "Canadian" and, second, overemphasizing the importance of this particular battle and deemphasizing the role of empire building and colonization in the creation of Canada (Barker 2009). First, the soldiers buried at Smith's Knoll might or might not have been settlers with some claim to being early Canadians. Some were likely to have been born in Britain and some likely intended to return there. The distinct lack of names of the dead at Smith's Knollor attempts to ascertain them-however, allows for a blurring of the boundary between settlement colony and imperial core, and thus contemporary settler commentators can claim these long-dead soldiers as their own people, regardless of whether or not the dead would have agreed. Meanwhile, responsibility for the aggressive acts that created so much chaos in the area, for the conflict that resulted in the dividing of the Haudenosaunee by the imposition of the British-American border, and that directly or indirectly caused the deaths of many Indigenous people, is displaced away from the settler nation. Canada is still able to maintain its own identity as a peaceful nation, because aggressive military action is the purview of historical British and Americans with whom relationships can be claimed or disavowed as settler Canadians see fit. Further, by focusing on the effects of the war on creating Canada and Canadians, the longer term geopolitical impacts of the war are obscured. Both Canada and the United States were set on trajectories of conquest by this war. For Canadians, their alliance with Haudenosaunee warriors (Benn 1998;Taylor 2010), contrasted with the American driving out of Haudenosaunee communities through the late eighteenth century, undoubtedly contributed to the "peacemaker myth" that has endured in settler Canadian society as a cover or excuse for acts of violent colonization like the imposition of residential schools (Regan 2010). Meanwhile, for Americans, victories over Tecumseh's confederacy (Sugden 1999;Taylor 2010) and other Indigenous nations in the West during the War of 1812 certainly foreshadowed the aggressive expansion of the later Indian Wars. In both narratives, it is obscured that the War of 1812 marked a turning point in relationships between settler states in North America, as the United States never fought another war with either the British or the Dominion of Canada and, consequently, the political and military power of Indigenous allies was drastically reduced after the war.

Conclusion
This returns us to the concept of necro-settlement. Developing a growing index of ways in which settler colonizers transfer lands away from Indigenous peoples is important for several reasons. First and foremost, because the process of settler colonization creates a new and ahistorical social reality, understanding the various techniques and technologies of transfer can help us to see them in operation when these processes might otherwise be obscured. For myself, it was not until I became aware of settler colonialism as a concept that I began to question the banality of the landscape in which I was raised. Further, necro-settlement as a concept demands that we reexamine many practices and cultural beliefs around death and dying in settler colonial contexts. Does not the practice of holding settler cemeteries inviolate while frequently destroying or pillaging Indigenous burial sites raise questions of the enduring coloniality of Canadian society? Should not the idea that burial in the ground contributes to a long-running and frequently genocidal colonial project give pause to both scholars of death and dying and settler people contemplating their own bodily ends? What further changes must we make to our readings of nationalism or militarism in settler societies when we consider the ways in which they might work through the bodies of dead soldiers-even those who might not be from the nation in question?
One of the most compelling reasons for developing necro-settlement as a frame of analysis is its potential role in disrupting settler colonial memory production as a wider project. To do this, it is important to understand how memory is rooted in landscape and how deathscapes as a kind of landscape imbued with particular power are linked into wider geographies of belonging and exclusion. For example, Makdisi (2010) wrote about the displacement of Palestinian bodies from the Ma'man Allah cemetery in Jerusalem as part of the construction of the ironically named "Museum of Tolerance." The museum is itself a memorial space, dedicated to the memory of various peoples killed by various violent regimes. Thus we can see the production of a multilayered, networked topographical deathscape, a linchpin in the incredibly complex colonial dynamics of Jerusalem. Similar patterns of enforced remembrance and erasure of indigeneity through the particular, conspicuous situating of settler bodies and memorials are clearly at play in Canada as well, both in and around Smith's Knoll and Battlefield Park but elsewhere, too. This similarity suggests a pattern that can potentially signal a site of intervention through unsettling colonial burial and memorial practices. Necro-settlement and the treatment of the bodies of dead settlers by living ones compels us to think beyond temporal boundaries and spatial divisions, to understand the entanglements between living embodiments of settler colonial power and the materialization of that power in the bodies of the dead, and to question not just how settler people colonize while they are alive but how they might be prevented from continuing to do so after death. 5. This term is adapted from Mignolo (2000, 3), who used it to denote the ways that colonizers conceived of themselves and their spaces as fundamentally different from Indigenous peoples and spaces. I assert that the colonial difference can also be broadly deployed in reference to the difference between a colonizer's expectations of colonization, and the reality of "doing" colonization in place (for details, see Barker 2013, 133-37). 6. This term is inspired by Selbin's (2010) use of bricolage to describe how stories are made from pieces of preexisting narratives, individual experiences, and creative improvisation. I use the term here to describe both narrative and material processes. 7. It is imperative that the historical occupation of the Haudenosaunee and Anishnaabe in this region not disappear from settler colonial analyses. Ethical research on any kind of colonialism must work to avoid further erasing indigeneity (Smith 1999;Lewis 2012). 8. For more detail on the Battle of Stoney Creek, see Elliot (2009). 9. In the summer of 2014, a sculpture by David M. General (Oneida) titled "The Eagles among Us" was installed on the grounds of Battlefield Park. It was commissioned as part of the War of 1812 Bicentennial Commemoration, in part to recognize the contributions of Indigenous warriors in the Battle of Stoney Creek and elsewhere, but it is not as yet listed on the Battlefield House Museum and Park Web site (see battlefieldhouse.ca), nor is it easy to find information on the sculpture either at the park or online, and the sculpture sits quite literally on the periphery of the park. Interpreting the meaning of this recent addition is an interesting avenue of inquiry but beyond the scope of this article. 10. Transcribed by author, May 2014. 11. Thank you to Kelly Black for inquiring into the roles of churches and faith in settler colonial nationalism. 12. Recent Haudenosaunee research and writing has challenged the nationalist historical narratives of places like Stoney Creek. Monture's (2014) book, We Share Our Matters, documents 200 years of literature developed at Six Nations of the Grand River in opposition to colonial displacement and dispossession, asserting a constant and evolving counterargument against settler claims. Hill's (2017) book, The Clay We Are Made Of, deconstructs historical and anthropological claims that assert that Haudenosaunee people do not belong in or did not ever have claim to land in southern Ontario, particularly by relying on Haudenosaunee oral histories. Finally, McCarthy's (2016) book, In Divided Unity, demonstrates that Haudenosaunee people have never stopped practicing acts of direct resistance to land loss but that settler colonial discourses have predictably attempted to coopt the land and legal frameworks around these. 13. Exclusive in theory if not always in practice; for examples of public and social reclamation of cemetery spaces in Britain, see Deering (2012). 14. The property was eventually purchased, the house demolished, and a comprehensive archaeological dig undertaken to properly rebury the bodies, funded by public budgets.