Q&A: What does death and burial tell us about ourselves? Local historian explores just that

Michelle Hamilton is fascinated by cemeteries. 

She says she believes the way we bury our dead — and how we hope to be buried — reflects what we think in life.

This fall, the public history professor at Western University is launching a new course to explore history around death and burial called 'Cities of the Dead: Cemeteries, Death and Mourning in North America.'

CBC's Allison Devereaux spoke with Hamilton on London Morning to learn more.

AD: Why are you so interested in cemeteries and burial traditions?

MH: As I think back, I've wandered and walked through cemeteries for a couple of decades now. As a child, when I went to church, across the street from the church was the old Colonel Thomas Talbot burial. Talbot was the land agent that helped settle this area. There was just something about the ancientness of it that really fascinated me, and that's never really left me.

AD: What has all this taught you about the way we bury our dead?

MH: The way we bury our dead, or we plan how we wish to be buried ourselves, really reflects what we think in life. If you go to old historic cemeteries, you can see ethnicities represented. 

If you were an immigrant to Canada and you were from Scotland, you might put a thistle on your grave as a remembrance, or people were sometimes very specific about saying 'born in Scotland' and wanted that to be on their gravestone.

LISTEN: Michelle Hamilton discusses how death and burial is changing in North America

AD: What are some of the most interesting things you've seen in local cemeteries? 

MH: I think they are the more modern graves actually, because as technology has become more sophisticated, you can actually put anything you want on a gravestone. You can put a photo of yourself on a gravestone. I've seen a laser etching of a motorcycle. Whereas, before you would get a catalog with tombstone selections and you would pick from a standard selection of motifs that stone carvers could do. But now, it's pretty much anything you want. 

AD: While you were structuring this course, what is it you wanted to teach students and get across to them?

MH: The first thing I wanted to get across is my love of cemeteries. I know there are students out there who are also equally fascinated by that. So I thought if we could all get in a room together and talk, that would be very interesting. But in history we call cemeteries cultural landscapes, and that simply means that we can look at the tombstones, the trees, the deer, the way the paths are laid out, whether the tombstones are flat or or standing tall, and that all tells us something about society.

We're also going to look at how people were buried, because some humans were buried and other people were not. They might have been buried, but they have been dug up later, or they weren't buried at all. That also often has racial overtones, and those bodies are now in museums and people are calling for them to be returned. So, we're going to look at who actually gets buried and who does not.

AD: What do you mean by that? 

MH: In North America, many Indigenous graves were dug up for a variety of reasons, and those bones and skulls have ended up in many, many museums. In other places, Indigenous people have been calling for their repatriation for a number of decades.

More recently, with the Black Lives Matter movement, there's been more attention to slave bodies in museums, and people have been calling for the return of those as well. And they're often reburied, sometimes in secret locations so that they're not disturbed again.

AD: How we bury our dead can say so much about how we live. Do you think that the way cemeteries function now, does it seem modern? Does it seem to be keeping in step with how we live now?

MH: Certainly the rise of of the choice of being cremated is closer to how we live now. Cremating bodies allows us to put more bodies into a cemetery. There's more of a focus on a celebration of life rather than perhaps a a mourning period or a funeral in which we have religious overtones. A lot of society now is not as religious as they used to be. Funerals don't necessarily happen in churches anymore. They happen in funeral homes. So the religion part can be downplayed, if that's what the people wish.