Enslaved people resisted colonial authority by controlling where their dead were buried

Evidence

Throughout Saint-Domingue the enslaved often created their own cemeteries by taking over those no longer used by whites. In one town in the Northern Province an abandoned cemetery was still “recognized by the superstitious veneration of the negroes.” In the parish of Aquin, in the south, slaves buried their dead near the ruins of the chapel on the site of an early settlement. Attempts to force them to use the official cemetery failed; the slaves just waited until night to bury their dead. So the bodies of those once enslaved were buried alongside the bodies of those once free. — Dubois, Laurent, Avengers of the New World_ The Story of…, 55

Categorization

• XREF: Burial as a site of slave resistance connects to later claims about Afro-Caribbean religious practice and marronage as cultural autonomy.
• SEED: Cemetery politics — who controls the dead — as an angle on how subjugated populations maintain sovereignty when every living institution is denied.