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“We are not scum”: The horror suffered by Canada’s indigenous women

A mountain of windblown garbage. Bodies among them. For years, the remains of a serial killer sat in a landfill – the latest chapter in a long history of violence against Canada’s indigenous women. Morgan Harris and Marcedes Myran were raped, killed, dismembered and thrown out with the garbage in Winnipeg, Manitoba. Police suspect their remains are buried deep in the Prairie Green landfill. The incomplete remains of another victim, Rebecca Contois, were found in two locations – in a garbage bin in the city and in a separate landfill. The body of a fourth, unidentified woman in her 20s – dubbed Buffalo Woman – is still missing. Her killer, Jeremy Skibicki, now 37 and linked to white supremacists, confessed in 2022 and was brought to trial. A verdict is expected next month. But her relatives have not been able to lay her to rest because excavations to search for her remains have not yet begun. Indigenous women are disproportionately victims of violence in Canada and often poorly protected by authorities who are accused of paying little attention to their plight. Instead, they are “thrown in the trash,” says Elle Harris, Morgan Harris’ 19-year-old daughter. A member of the Long Plain tribe, Elle wears a traditional skirt with her hair in a long braid. She says her mother had a difficult life, being homeless for years after losing custody of her five children due to drug addiction. “My mother was taken just like that, just like that. And I wish I could see her again, talk to her again,” she tells AFP. Instead, she and her family keep vigil near the Prairie Green landfill, where they have set up teepees, a sacred fire, red dresses and a banner demanding empathy: “What if it was your daughter?” For months — during Winnipeg’s windy winter — they have taken turns staying at the makeshift camp, trying, Elle said, “to prove that we are something, that we are not garbage, that you can’t just throw us in the trash.” It was also part of their campaign to push authorities to excavate the site, which has continued to be used since Skibicki’s confession, with new truckloads of rubble arriving regularly to be piled on top of the rubble already there. Permission for the excavation was finally granted in late 2023, shortly after Winnipeg elected Canada’s first Indigenous provincial leader, Wab Kinew. But searchers must sift through tons of garbage and construction debris, and such an operation carries significant risks due to the presence of toxic materials such as asbestos, independent experts said. Ultimately, it could take years and cost tens of millions of dollars. Morgan Harris’ family has vowed to keep up their vigil until her remains are recovered. – ‘Devastating history’ – Skibicki targeted Indigenous women he met in homeless shelters, prosecutors said at his trial, which began in late April. A judge is expected to hand down a verdict on July 11. At the time of his arrest, then-Crown-Indigenous Relations Minister Marc Miller said the case was part of a “legacy of a devastating history” of treatment of Indigenous women in Canada “that resonates to this day.” “Nobody can stand before you with confidence and say this isn’t going to happen again, and I find that kind of shameful,” he said. Indigenous women are vastly overrepresented among victims of femicide in Canada, representing about a fifth of all women killed in gender-based homicides in the country – even though they make up just five percent of the female population, according to official figures covering an 11-year period ending in 2021. This year in particular, the rate of gender-based homicides of Indigenous victims was more than three times the rate of such killings of girls and women overall, the report said. “Canada is viewed as a country that upholds human rights. rights,” said Hilda Anderson-Pyrz, an activist who has been advocating for Indigenous women for years. But when “we are being dumped like garbage in landfills, it clearly shows that something is very wrong in this country.” In 2019, a national commission went so far as to call the thousands of murders and disappearances of First Nations women over the years “genocide.” Isolated, marginalized and deeply affected by intergenerational trauma, they face disproportionate violence due to “state actions and omissions rooted in colonialism and colonial ideologies built on assumptions of superiority,” the commission concluded. That conclusion is shared by some of Skibicki’s victims’ families. Marcedes Myran’s young children don’t understand why she is in a landfill, admits her great-grandmother Donna Bartlett, who is raising them in her small, crowded home in a remote Winnipeg neighbourhood. Marcedes was a friendly, cheerful girl who liked to play jokes, the 66-year-old recalls. She laments the authorities’ reluctance to search the dump. “If (the women) had been white, they would have done it in a heartbeat,” she says. – ‘Highway of Tears’ – Further west, in British Columbia, there is a hundreds-mile stretch of road known as the “Highway of Tears” – a stark monument, activists say, to the many ways in which Canada has failed Indigenous women. Here, nature is spectacular – the snow-capped mountains, the giant trees, the meandering Skeena River, waterfalls and abundant wildlife such as foxes, bears and eagles. But on the side of the highway there is an incongruous sight: red dresses nailed to posts symbolising missing women, faded photos of young girls with beaming smiles, messages promising rewards for information on where they have gone. Since the 1960s, as many as 50 women – and some men – have disappeared along the 450-mile (725-kilometer) highway that connects Prince Rupert on the Pacific coast near Alaska to Prince George. All are believed to be young and indigenous. Many disappeared while hitchhiking or walking home on Highway 16. No community in the region was spared. Tamara Chipman, who was from the Wet’suwet’en First Nation, was on her way to Prince Rupert to visit friends when she was last seen hitchhiking on September 21, 2005. She was 22 and the mother of a young boy. Her aunt, Gladys Radek, described her as a spirited young woman who “loved fast boats and fishing and also life” in a region marked by social decay and drugs. In these isolated and impoverished communities, connected only by this single highway lined with deep forests, and with no proper telephone network or public transportation, many young people are forced to hitchhike to get from A to B. They often meet casual workers who have come to work in the local mines: mostly well-paid, single men. The Chipman case, like most disappearances along the route, was never solved. – Neglected – When Lana Derrick disappeared, one of the women went missing in the area 25 years ago, “we had some difficulty initially getting the support of the RCMP to take the case seriously,” her cousin Wanda Good says of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police. Many of the families have observed that efforts to find women stigmatized as drug addicts, prostitutes or alcoholics are mediocre at best. In several cases, families say they organized the initial searches themselves – both for their missing relatives and for witnesses. The head of the RCMP admitted to the national commission in 2018 that for too many Indigenous families, “the RCMP was not the police it needed to be during that terrible time in your life.” Studies show a deep-rooted mistrust between the police and Indigenous people. It goes back decades when the police were used as the armed arm of Canadian governments when they imposed a policy of forced assimilation on the country’s indigenous people. At the RCMP headquarters in British Columbia on the outskirts of Vancouver, police officer Wayne Clary, a veteran homicide investigator, tries to explain the Highway of Tears tragedy. “The northern areas are very, very isolated. Some of the activities that these women engage in, not just Indigenous women but other women as well, they put themselves at the disposal of men who target women,” he says. He denies allegations of botched investigations, but admits: “In the past, communication may not have taken place.” – “Never stop looking” – Clary is part of the E-Pana unit, which was set up in 2005 – more than 30 years after the disappearances began – to “determine whether one serial killer or several serial killers are responsible.” Eighteen women are on the unit’s list – 13 murders and five disappearances between 1969 and 2006. So far, no connection has been established between the cases. The investigation is ongoing, but new murders are not being processed by the special unit. The most recent case – that of Chelsey Quaw, a 29-year-old Indigenous woman who was reported missing after leaving her home in the Saik’uz First Nation – dates back to last November. There has been progress in recent years, Good notes: the police are listening more to families and new relay antennas for mobile communications have been installed on the streets. “We are making progress, but very, very slowly, at a snail’s pace,” she says. But it is a collective tragedy that the country does not want to face, believes 69-year-old Radek. She speaks slowly and seriously, her voice sometimes rising in anger as she describes how she began traveling around the country “to tell the stories of all these women with broken lives, to be the voice of these families because they were silenced.” Her dilapidated van is filled with photos of the missing. When she drives through the surrounding villages along the Highway of Tears, residents often stop her and talk to her. Her fight now takes her outside Canada to conferences and demonstrations where she wants to draw attention to the plight of women. “I will never stop looking,” she says.tib/amc/st