Infrastructures of Care - A Heritage of Heart, Relationality & Black Placemaking

Summary

This is an abstract from the session entitled "Landscapes of Care: Exploring Heart-centered Practice in Historical Archaeology", at the 2025 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology.

In Canada, cultural heritage efforts have largely focused on the recovery, collection, and protection of European material cultural and landscapes. This has resulted in the overrepresentation of white settler history and the mis/underrepresentation of the history and stories of the Black experience within the nation. This erasure has significantly impacted how Black heritage is represented, remembered, protected, and cared for. In this paper, I critically examine these representational politics through the analysis of Ontario Heritage Trust’s 2021 Provincial Plaque Program – an inventory listing of registered provincial plaques commemorating the significant historical and cultural events as well as people and places throughout Ontario. Drawing on the heart-centered principles of care, accountability, and relationality, I argue for the need to integrate community relations with Black descendants into Ontario’s cultural heritage policies, practices, and representational frameworks as one of many steps into transforming current practices and co-constructing new heritage worlds in Ontario.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for Historical Archaeology 2025   •
• Landscapes of Care: Exploring Heart-centered Practice in Historical Archaeology

Keywords

Individual & Institutional Roles

Contact(s): Nicole Haddow