Dennis Wright traces a dotted red line that cuts through a cemetery in an aerial photo of his community of Fort McPherson, N.W.T.
“[That’s] where they expect the slope to be in thirty years,” he said. “The church would be gone, and a little more than half the cemetery will be gone.”
Wright is a project manager with the Rat River Development Corporation, an Indigenous-owned operation focused on sustainable development for the Gwich’in Nation in Fort McPherson. While at a riverbank erosion workshop in early December, he gave a presentation about his community’s difficult situation.
Fort McPherson is on a small plateau on the eastern side of the Peel River. That plateau has a steep slope – at times as steep as 70 degrees – that is gradually eroding and moving closer and closer to St. Matthew’s Anglican Church and the cemetery next to it.
“We are concerned that we may have to … start moving graves and nobody wants to do that.”
Wright blames the slope’s instability on climate change, thawing permafrost and land development. But graves in Fort McPherson are not the only ones in the North threatened by erosion, even though the reasons for it vary from place to place.
Miki Ehrlich, a partnership facilitator for the Northwest Territories Association of Communities, organized the three-day riverbank erosion workshop in Yellowknife. She also took it upon herself to do a presentation about cemeteries and erosion.
Ehrlich said one of the challenges she’s observed during her eight years with the association is communities have to go to various agencies when dealing with erosion: they need engineers to see if structures can be moved, maps for making informed decisions and funding to make the work happen, for example.
And that’s why she’s excited about work unfolding in the Yukon.
The Yukon government has hired an environmental consultant to document shoreline erosion and to develop guidance for assessing and mitigating it.
According to the request for proposal, the project is being jointly led by the territory’s environment; highways and public works; and energy, mines and resources departments.
“They recognize, just like here [in the N.W.T.], there is no one territorial department or unit that’s working solidly on riverbank erosion. It falls between things like hydrology and geology and infrastructure,” said Ehrlich.
“I brought that to the attention of the Government of the Northwest Territories, because I think it’s a really great, great example.”
Ehrlich found three different solutions for communities whose cemeteries are threatened by erosion: protect the site and slow the erosion, relocate the cemetery, or accept the loss and allow nature to take its course.
All of them, she emphasized, require engagement with community members and information – like how fast the change is happening and how much time there is left to make a decision about what to do.
Time was not something that Carcross/Tagish First Nation had when an eroding riverbank exposed a burial near Tagish back in 2018.
Jen Herkes, a heritage consultant who has been working with the Carcross/Tagish First Nation in the Yukon for the last 11 years, was among those called in after riverbank erosion on the Tagish river exposed a grave.
“We did kind of an emergency blitz reaction in terms of how to cope,” she recalled.
She said the First Nation went to elders’ homes and asked them what should be done and “it was made very clear to us that we should leave it alone and touch it as little as possible.” A large cedar plank was placed against the burial to protect it, and then it was covered with gravel and dirt.
“It was very important to the community to have it done as quickly as possible to avoid too many, like, people being able to have access to it, potential pot hunting, or grave robbing. As well as just the sense that the spirit needed to be returned to rest.”
Herkes said the sensitive situation taught her the need for clear communication and transparency.
“The machinery that was coming to do the work was all local citizens … and they smudged their equipment going in and out every day. And there was, they were doing a ceremony and prayers around that, so that they could be doing things in a good way.”
A Kitikmeot community in Nunavut, meanwhile, has been tracking erosion on a nearby island with an old cemetery since 2021.
David Didier, a professor of geography at Université du Québec à Rimouski, said the Hamlet of Kugluktuk reached out with questions about erosion unfolding on Graveyard Island in the mouth of the Coppermine River.
His team looked at historical imagery and found that between the 1950s and 2023, the shoreline had retreated 20 metres inland next to the cemetery.
Simon Kuliktana, who was recently elected the community’s MLA, said the erosion isn’t a big problem now, but he expects it’s a process that will continue and that Kugluktuk will need to make a tough decision about the cemetery in the future.
Relocation might be the only option, he said, even though it would be difficult.
“It would bring out a lot of raw emotions, I think … if it came to that,” he said. “Removing our family from their final resting place. That’s probably the most emotional part. To me, that would be the most difficult.”
Kuliktana said his parents and his siblings are buried in the cemetery on Graveyard Island. He said he probably won’t be alive when a decision about the cemetery is made – but that it doesn’t feel appropriate to let nature take its course.
Back at the erosion workshop in Yellowknife, Wright, the project manager and head of community slope stabilization efforts in Fort McPherson, says his community hasn’t made a decision about how to navigate erosion at its cemetery either.
But in the meantime other work is underway to address the problem.
Because Fort McPherson is a national historic site, Wright said it can apply for conservation funding from Parks Canada to measure ground stability, monitor the slope’s movement, and come up with ways to slow erosion.
Nehtruh-EBA Consulting estimated in a 2019 report that the slope beside Fort McPherson will have moved so far into town within 30 years that the ground will have given out below the community’s church, more than half the cemetery, the health centre and other homes and buildings.
After a site visit in the summer, the company said in a report last month that there had been “no dramatic changes in terrain.” It also recommended some steps that Wright is working on to slow erosion.
That includes planting birch trees which have a strong root system that can help stabilize the ground, filling tension cracks with bentonite chips that expand when wet and slow the cracks from getting bigger, and discouraging people from making piles of brush, waste, fill, and snow at the top of the slope.
As the river erosion workshop drew to a close, Wright said he planned to go home and share what he’s learned about the erosion threatening their cemetery.
“We have to find a safe place for our relatives,” he said. “Right now, the place that they’re buried is not a secure safe place.”
