The search in a Winnipeg landfill for the remains of two missing indigenous women, Morgan Harris and Marcedes Myran, presumed to have been tragically murdered by a serial killer, Jeremy Skibicki, a 35-year-old white man also charged with killing two other aboriginal women, is a mission with no clear start beginning or end.
The lack of a clear beginning except for the charges of first-degree murder against Skibicki on December 1, 2022, is the relative absence of attention paid to the cause of these women’s demise, including the most immediate one, their reputed murder by the hands of a man whose conviction could well be jeopardized by a three-year search for their remains.
Neither are the historical facts leading up to the murder of these women ever mentioned in the established indigenous narrative consumed by giving emotional closure to the families and communities of these women.
As important as psychological closure may be in murder cases, the details of Morgan Harris’ life dispute its overriding motive for this particular search. According to her daughter Cambria, a strident activist leading the demand for the excavation of the Prairie Trail landfill where her mother’s remains are believed to be buried, she was removed from Morgan’s care at the age of six.
“I probably didn’t see her for a few years after that,” she has claimed.
Cambria, who was part of the child welfare system until she was 17, said she watched her mother struggle with addiction, mental health issues and homelessness after she lost custody of her children.
“She was in and out of treatment centres and homeless centres repeatedly trying to get help, and she spent her life on the streets fighting to survive, and she lived in fear.”
Yet her family or community members may never have vigorously attempted to bring her home.
Yes, Harris’ death at such a young age — she was only 39 — is a tragic event, but to remove her human agency by blaming society for her problems only serves to infantilize indigenous women. It also exempts Cambria and the families of other indigenous victims from doing more to ensure their safety.
The case of Marcedes Myran, aged 24, one of Skibicki’s other alleged victims, is particularly instructive of the troubled nature of many indigenous families. Her mother waited seven long months before finally reporting her as missing to the police in late September 2022.
This suggests that shame and guilt may also be driving the grief, anguish, and zeal to find the remains of these women.
Also never mentioned is that indigenous people rarely visit or carefully maintain their community cemeteries, suggesting that finding and memorializing the remains of these women is only part of this story.
Another ignored part is that such a search for human remains should be both headed and conducted by impartial, highly trained forensic police officers. But that’s not happening.
Instead, the most important features of the investigation are now controlled by a collection of self-serving individuals with no background in forensic science following the decision by two separate and independent law enforcement bodies – the Winnipeg Police Service (WPS) and the RCMP – that such a search was not feasible.
This occurred because of the intense lobbying by the families of the two women actively supported by many indigenous leaders, organizations, activists, and the mainstream media.
In short, what should be a police investigation has been transformed into an indigenous-led political movement.
Lobbying for the search began after a December 6, 2022 statement by Winnipeg Police Service Chief Danny Smyth stating that his forensic experts had made the “very difficult decision” not to search the Prairie Green garbage dump because it wasn’t feasible to do so given the passage of time since the remains were placed there, the large volume of material deposited after their placement, and serious physical dangers associated with excavating the site.
But the danger of searching for and near impossibility of finding the remains of these tragically murdered women, seemingly more cherished in death than they were in life by all and sundry, did nothing to prevent this heartbreaking misfortune from going into overdrive after.
Marc Miller, the former Minister of Crown-Indigenous relations, allocated $500,000 to the Assembly of Manitoba Chiefs (AMC) in February 8, 2023, “to examine the feasibility of a search” for the two women’s bodies.
The AMC quickly appointed a feasibility study committee, its nine-member oversight sub-committee composed solely of indigenous people, including representatives of the two affected families.
How can that be possible?
In the interests of elementary scientific objectivity, accountability, and transparency, the long secret feasibility study should have been led by disinterested parties. Instead, a decision to search with no guarantee of success was predetermined by biased parties.
Along with the potential dangers to workers conducting the search – the most often repeated provincial government concern – and the lack of certainty any remains would be found, this led Premier Heather Stefanson to announce on July 5 that her government would not fund or otherwise support a search of the landfill because the province “cannot knowingly risk Manitoba workers’ health and safety for a search without a guarantee.“
On July 12, Miller called the Manitoba government’s decision “heartless” and callous and that it had damaged, if not destroyed, the federal government’s ability to help with the search.
“The federal government’s willing to help. We’re willing to play a role, a very important role in this. But the government can’t nationalize a garbage dump or the waste-disposal system for the City of Winnipeg,” he said.
The next day, Miller added the federal government could not step in unless the province gave its jurisdictional permission.
None of these statements has any credibility given that the federal government would only serve as paymaster for a search that would be micromanaged by the Assembly of Manitoba Chiefs, just as the search for thousands of reputedly missing Indian Residential School students believed to be buried in unmarked graves across the country has been controlled by local indigenous bands.
Waste Connections of Canada, owner of the Prairie Trail facility, has fully cooperated with provincial authorities by, among other things, immediately closing off the section of the landfill where the women’s remains are believed to be buried. As for the province of Manitoba, Stefanson has declared the province would not prevent the federal government from ordering a search as long as worker safety was assured.
Worker safety, though critical, is still something of a smokescreen. On July 21, Stefanson told Global News Winnipeg that the “difficult” choice not to participate in the search was made out of potential safety concerns for the workers who would be searching the Prairie Green landfill. But in a statement the day before, the union representing landfill workers said there’s no reason the search can’t be done if proper precautions are taken. Clearly, Stefanson continues to highlight the risks because this serves to counter the “heartless” accusation.
Federal officials have undoubtedly dissected the landfill feasibility study in the same way as provincial officials and now seem desperately looking for an exit strategy out of a hopeless search based on a feasibility study that doesn’t pass the smell test, hence the shift of all blame for not searching to the province, a more deceitful effort than Stefanson’s preoccupation with safety issues.
At the end of the day, what is left is a search rooted in bias and indigenous racial privilege, resulting in contrived feasibility, aversion to accountability, and rejection of transparency.
Add to this mix nasty political considerations, a negation of possible excavation risks, a drawn-out search possibly compromising the conviction of Skibicki, and the absence of human remains as the only likely outcome, says this is a search without a cause except one: the search itself.
This helps explain why Jacqueline Romanow, a Métis associate professor in the University of Winnipeg’s indigenous studies department, just said, “This [search] is the issue of our times right now.”
That the search itself rather than the desire to find the remains of these women is now the focus also saw more than two dozen indigenous motorcyclists roared down the highway from Saskatchewan to Manitoba on the morning of July 26 to lend their voices to the growing call from across the country to search the landfill. Many more local and national protestors are bound the join them in what is destined to be a long and possibly violent summer of protest in Winnipeg.
Hymie Rubenstein is a retired professor of anthropology, The University of Manitoba, and editor of The REAL Indigenous Issues Newsletter.
