Find the stolen sisters
Unlike so many missing Indigenous women, we are pretty sure where to find Marcedes Myran and Morgan Harris. The Winnipeg Police believe that they are in a landfill north of the city. A third woman, known as Buffalo Woman, is believed to be there too.
All three women went missing between March and May of 2022. They are all believed to be in the landfill, because they are also all believed to have been killed by the same man, along with one other woman, Rebecca Contois.
Her story is a disturbing one.
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Rebecca’s body was dismembered and parts of it were found in a dumpster. Police followed this lead to the landfill and found the rest of her remains.
While the police did search the landfill for Rebecca, they refused to do so for Marcedes, Morgan, or Buffalo Woman. They cited feasibility as the reason. But calls for the landfill to be searched were raised by the families and communities involved. These calls were heeded, at least insofar as to have an independent feasibility study commissioned and paid for by the federal government.
In May of this year, the feasibility study was delivered to the federal government and the provincial government. Shortly after receiving the report on the study the Manitoba government declared that they would not order a search of the Prairie Green Landfill. This is despite the feasibility study finding that a search could be done safely if undertaken with precautions and mitigation measures.
For the families the feasibility study alone is not good enough. Cambria Harris (Morgan Harris’ daughter) continues to call for her mother to be returned to her. The communities from which the women come, and other Indigenous peoples and communities, join her in the call for Morgan, Marcedes, and Buffalo Woman to be returned to their people.
There are so many threads in this story.
A beautiful and powerful one is the thread that is the naming of Buffalo Woman. The name came about as a result of consultations between Medicine Bear – a counselling service that serves the Indigenous community in the part of the city where the women disappeared from – and elders. Through ceremony Medicine Bear and the elders identified Buffalo Woman as a loving and culturally centred name, rather than Jane Doe. Buffalo Woman was chosen because it is central to naming ceremonies in local Indigenous communities. When people engage in a ceremony to find their own name, they are called Buffalo Woman until they do so. This is because a person must have a name in order to be found and guided to the spirit world, and it is Buffalo Woman who is the guide.
Another thread is #WeAreNotTrash, which is the hashtag being used by people who have been calling on the police since last December to search for the victims of the alleged serial killer. (His crimes have yet to be proven in court.) It is also the chant being shouted by people marching in the streets of Winnipeg.
Another thread is the camp at the Brady Road landfill. This camp started as a blockade that went up in December, because it was in early December that the families were notified that their missing loved ones were dead and likely in the landfill. On December 11th, a rally was held at the Brady Road landfill and on December 18th, a camp, now known as Camp Morgan, was erected at the entrance to the dump. The blockade has not remained, but the camp has. A sacred fire was lit, which has been tended ever since, and red dresses have been hung on the chain link fence which encircles the landfill. Those at the camp want awareness to be raised, not just about their loss, but about the losses of so many families across Canada. They also want awareness to be raised about the systems and institutions that failed their loved ones, causing them to be vulnerable and marginalized. They also want both the city-run Brady Road landfill, and the privately owned Prairie Green landfill to be searched.
Some speculate that if a search were to take place, more women than Marcedes, Morgan, and Buffalo Woman would be found. This was the case in the early 2000s just outside of Vancouver, when police finally caught up to Robert Pickton. For decades, community and family members had been reporting missing Indigenous women, and signs pointed towards Pickton. When his home and farm were finally searched, many more women were found than what the police had expected.
There are still more threads to be teased from this situation, and still more stories to be told. What is clear right now, is that generations of colonization, racism, and intergenerational trauma coupled with ongoing sexism and misogyny have left Indigenous women and girls marginalized and vulnerable. The systems that have made them so, should be the same systems that return them to their families.
Search the landfill.