Hope in the search for Indigenous remains in a Canadian landfill

Winnipeg, Canada – Temperatures have started to dip below freezing again, and snow now blankets the grasslands of Manitoba, a province in midwestern Canada.

Still, they remain. For nearly a year, demonstrators have gathered outside two landfills near Winnipeg, the provincial capital, to push for the recovery of Indigenous remains believed to be buried among the debris.

But morale among the demonstrators has lifted. After months of inaction, a recent election has reignited hopes that the bodies of three missing women might finally return home.

In October, Manitoba became the first Canadian province to elect a First Nations premier, Wab Kinew.

He campaigned on searching the landfills for the missing women, something his predecessor Heather Stefanson refused to do.

“I do believe that he’ll do it. And I do believe we will bring these women home,” said Jorden Myran, whose sister’s remains are believed to be at one of the landfills.

Indigenous women targeted

A member of the Long Plain First Nation and a mother of two, Marcedes Myran was 26 years old when she disappeared in May 2022.

On December 1 last year, Winnipeg police announced that Myran and three other women were likely murdered by the same man, as part of an alleged killing spree that took place that spring.

“The fact that we searched for her for months when she was already gone was so hard,” Jorden recalled.

Another member of the Long Plain First Nation, 39-year-old Morgan Harris, was among the suspected victims. Her cousin, Melissa Robinson, remembers the moment her family learned that Harris was presumed dead.

“The detective sat us down and told us that Morgan had been murdered and that she had been the victim of a serial killer,” Robinson said.

But when one of Harris’s five children, Cambria Harris, asked where her mother’s remains were, the detective explained that police had not been able to find them.

“We all kind of gasped,” Robinson said. “It wasn’t real to us. How do you deem someone not alive if you don’t know?”

In the week that followed, officials revealed that the two women were likely buried at the Prairie Green Landfill, a rubbish disposal facility in northwest Winnipeg.

Partial remains of another victim — 24-year-old Rebecca Contois, a member of the Crane River First Nation — had already been discovered at the Brady Road landfill south of the city.

It was Contois’s death that led to the arrest of Jeremy Skibicki in May. Police initially found remains belonging to Contois in a rubbish bin near Skibicki’s apartment.

A fourth woman was listed among the victims, though police have been unable to determine her identity. Like Myran and Harris, her body has yet to be found.

Police believe she is also Indigenous and in her 20s. Indigenous leaders have given her the ceremonial name Mashkode Bizhiki’ikwe, or Buffalo Woman, to honour her memory.

This month, Skibicki pleaded not guilty to all four homicide charges. A jury trial in his case is scheduled to begin in April.

Halting the landfill search

Almost as soon as the suspected serial killings were announced, Indigenous activists and family members started to rally for the recovery of the women’s bodies.

But on December 6, the Winnipeg police held a press conference to confirm they would not be searching the Prairie Green Landfill.

“We made the very difficult decision, as a service, that this wasn’t operationally feasible to conduct a search of this site,” Inspector Cam Mackid told reporters.

He cited the fact that 10,000 truckloads of rubbish had been deposited where the remains were believed to be, as well as 250 tonnes of asbestos and compacted construction clay.

The decision, however, left many protesters incensed. Within days, blockades were erected around the Brady Road landfill, as supporters called for both landfills to be shut down.

To this day, demonstrations continue outside the Brady Road landfill and beside the Canadian Museum for Human Rights in Winnipeg. One site has been named Camp Morgan, the other Camp Marcedes, in honour of the missing women.

A sacred fire and large weather-proof wigwam have become permanent structures at the landfill, where demonstrators have lived on site for the past 11 months. Dozens of red dresses cling to the site’s chain-link fence, representing Indigenous women who have disappeared like Myran and Harris.

Canada has grappled with disproportionate rates of missing and murdered Indigenous women, girls and two-spirit people for decades — a crisis that a recent national inquiry called a genocide.

The government estimated that Indigenous women and girls face a homicide rate six times higher than non-Indigenous women.

“We’re going on decades of women that have gone missing. And so where are they? Well, likely in the one place people are most resistant to look, which is the landfill,” said Niigaan Sinclair, a Native studies professor at the University of Manitoba.

A pivotal campaign issue

As the protests stretched from weeks into months, they collided with another major public event: Manitoba’s general elections.

The race pitted the ruling Progressive Conservative Party against the left-leaning New Democratic Party (NDP), led by Kinew. Whether to search the Prairie Green Landfill became a point of contention.

“You don’t remember campaigns, but you’ll remember this one because it was so egregious and so highly offensive and [preyed] on the worst of miseducation, ignorance and racism,” Sinclair said.

While Kinew said he would make “a good faith attempt” to recover the women’s remains if elected, his opponent — then-Premier Stefanson — campaigned on the promise she would not pursue a landfill search, citing worker safety and cost.

She met with the Harris and Myran families in July to tell them her government’s decision.

“I felt so defeated that day. And I left that meeting crying. I got up and thought, ‘You know what? I can’t listen to her any longer,’” Robinson recalled.

Donna Bartlett, Myran’s grandmother, told Al Jazeera that she felt race played a role in Stefanson’s choice.

“I know if it was [Stefanon’s] daughter or somebody else — some white person out here — they’d be there in a flash,” she said.

Supporters of the excavation effort point to the results of an Indigenous-led study released in May. It determined that a search is indeed feasible, albeit costly. The effort could take up to three years, at a price of 184 million Canadian dollars (US$135m).

Stefanson continued to voice opposition to any search effort as election day loomed.

During a televised election debate in September, she accused Kinew of being willing to “put Manitobans at risk” by supporting an excavation of the landfill.

The day after the debate, full-page newspaper ads and billboards touted that the Progressive Conservative Party was “standing firm” in its refusal to search for the women’s remains.

“What are you really standing firm against? Standing firm can only be interpreted as standing firm as racists,” Sinclair said.

Myran’s family was disgusted by the ads, with Bartlett calling them a “slap in the face”.

A historic win

The debate came to a head on election day, October 3. Before the results were announced, Robinson and other members of Myran’s family held a Zoom meeting with Crown-Indigenous Relations Minister Gary Anandasangaree, a federal cabinet minister responsible for Indigenous affairs.

He wanted to reassure Myran’s family that they had his support. Should Kinew become the next premier, Anandasangaree pledged to meet with him and discuss moving forward with the search, according to Robinson.

“He said, ‘I’m praying for you guys. I told you guys, I’m in this for the long haul. I support you,’” she recalled.

The meeting with the federal minister made Harris’s daughter Cambria — who has been at the forefront of the “Search The Landfill” movement — visibly emotional.

“It was the first time I’ve really seen her realise that there was going to be some good finally coming,” Robinson said.

Shortly after the call, Robinson left to spend the evening at the NDP election party at the Fort Garry Hotel, a historic hotel in downtown Winnipeg.

Results began to trickle in, and within hours, it was official: Kinew and the NDP would form a majority government.

Robinson was standing outside the party having a cigarette when Grand Chief Cathy Merrick of the Assembly of Manitoba Chiefs, an Indigenous advocacy organisation, came and told her the news.

“​​I started to cry. I remember I ran towards her and we were embracing each other. And we knew from that moment that they were going to come home,” she said.

Once inside, she was taken aback to see her niece Cambria surrounded by hundreds of people celebrating the victory.

“She looked so vulnerable, so opposite of how we always see her,” Robinson said. “I went and grabbed her and said, ‘I told you. I told you your mom’s coming home.’”

The circumstances of Stefanson’s defeat made Sinclair, the Native studies professor, reflect on the outgoing premier’s earliest days in office.

Stefanson became the first female premier of Manitoba in 2021, after former conservative leader Brian Pallister resigned after making comments that downplayed the harms of colonisation.

Sinclair said it’s ironic, then, that what began Stefanson’s tenure as premier — anti-Indigenous racism — is ultimately what ended it.

“They kept framing this [search] as a difficult decision. Showing empathy is not a difficult decision, and being kind to our relatives is not a difficult decision,” the professor said.

‘A calculated choice’

On October 26, a week after being sworn in as Manitoba’s premier, Kinew formally apologised to both families for the way they were treated under the previous provincial government.

“I think our opposition made a calculated choice to politicise the issue, and I think it was a mistake because it lacks humanity, dignity and compassion,” Kinew told Al Jazeera.

“I’m very proud of the people of Manitoba for discarding and rejecting that approach.”

Following the apology, Kinew met with the families privately in a pipe ceremony, a sacred Indigenous tradition.

The pipe represents an interface with the spirit world and uses tobacco — one of the four sacred medicines — that has been blessed for the ceremony.

Kinew himself is considered a “pipe carrier”, a ceremonial leader responsible for leading prayer and bringing communities together.

The son of an Anishinaabe leader, Kinew said he held the ceremony to convey his commitment to moving forward in a respectful way, consistent with Indigenous values.

“We conveyed our government’s seriousness about moving forward with the search and our desire to re-establish a respectful relationship with the families,” the premier said.

The ceremony resonated deeply with family members like Jorden Myran, who describes herself as a spiritual person.

“Him opening with [the pipe ceremony] felt very good to me,” she said.

While details about any prospective search have yet to be announced, Robinson is hopeful the Prairie Green Landfill will ultimately be excavated.

“I know what that pipe must mean to him as a pipe carrier,” Robinson said. “Once he’s made that commitment to our family, he has to follow through with it.”