Search without a cause

Reasons not to search for the remains of two murdered indigenous women

Prairie Green Landfill - image via Winnipeg Free Press

By Hymie Rubenstein

This title is a play on the well-known idiom “rebel without a cause” whose origins are unclear, but which was made famous by the 1955 movie of the same name starring the late James Dean.

As the film revealed, a rebel without a cause is a person who fights or protests established societal norms or government policies but without having any realistic or well-founded goal in mind save the fruitless battle itself.

That the search for the remains of two missing indigenous women in a Winnipeg landfill presumed to have been tragically murdered by a serial killer last year is a search without a cause is clear on several grounds.

That such a search should be headed and conducted by impartial, highly trained forensic police officers goes without saying. 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 happened after intense lobbying by the families of the two women actively supported by many indigenous leaders, organizations, and activists. In short, a police investigation has been transformed into an indigenous-led political movement.

Political mobilization began not long after it was revealed on December 1, 2022, by the Winnipeg Police Service that Jeremy Skibicki, a 35-year-old white man, had been charged with the brutal first-degree murder of four indigenous women, including 39-year-old Morgan Harris and 26-year Marcedes Myran.

Winnipeg police say Morgan Harris, Marcedes Myran, Rebecca Contois and a fourth unidentified woman the community has named Mashkode Bizhiki'ikwe, or Buffalo Woman, were all the victims of an alleged serial killer. Jeremy Skibicki, 35, is charged with four counts of first-degree murder. (Submitted by Cambria Harris, Donna Bartlett and Darryl Contois)

This was followed by a December 6 statement by Police Service Chief Danny Smyth who said that though it was believed the remains of Harris and Myran were at the Prairie Green Landfill just north of the city, his forensic experts had made the "very difficult decision" not to search that garbage dump after determining it wasn’t feasible to do so. This was because of the passage of time and the large volume of material deposited there, exacerbated by serious physical dangers associated with excavating that site.

An additional RCMP study, only recently made available via a freedom of information request, supports these assertions. 

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 quickly descending into political grandstanding.

On February 8, 2023, Marc Miller, the minister of Crown-Indigenous relations, allocated $500,000 to the Assembly of Manitoba Chiefs (AMC) following a request for funds “to examine the feasibility of a search” for the two women’s bodies.

The AMC quickly appointed a feasibility study committee (FSC), 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 still officially secret feasibility study should have been led by disinterested parties. Instead, the decision to search, an effort that would take between one and three years at a cost of between $84 million and $184 million with no guarantee of success, was predetermined.

These crude estimates are a window into other shortcomings of the study. While the technical subcommittee the FSC had two forensic experts, the landmark 2019 Paulsen and Moran study saw its warning “A search should not be initiated if more than 60 days had passed between the body entering the landfill and the search being initiated” arbitrarily rewritten as “Paulsen and Moran (2019) caution initiating a search when more than 60 days has [sic] passed between the body entering the landfill and the search being initiated.” 

Converting “don’t do it” to “be careful” points to a lack of professional objectivity, if not questionable ethics, in a search that would exceed the 60-day limit by 10-fold, were the Prairie Green excavation project to begin even as early as mid-August of this year.

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" of finding remains, a news release said.

On July 12, Marc 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 cannot 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 that search costs were not an issue and the province would not prevent the federal government from ordering a search as long as worker safety was assured.

Worker safety, though critical, is also a bit of a smokescreen. Stefanson told Global News Winnipeg in July that the “difficult” choice not to participate in the search was made out of potential safety concerns for workers who would be searching the Prairie Green landfill, and she stands by that decision. But in a statement the day before, the union representing landfill workers says there’s no reason the search can’t be done if proper precautions are taken, but Stefanson continues to point to the risks because this puts a human face on the issue to counter the accusation she is heartless. 

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 no search to the province, as much a smokescreen as Stefanson’s preoccupation with safety issues. 

Still, scoring some cheap anti-Conservative Party political points by an uncouth and nearly unprecedented gaslighting of Stefanson in the weeks leading up to an early October provincial election must have seemed like an irresistible added bonus.

At the end of the day, what is left is a search rooted in acute bias and indigenous racial privilege, resulting in contrived feasibility, aversion to accountability, and rejection of transparency.

Add to this mix nasty political considerations and a negation of excavation risks, a drawn-out search compromising the conviction of Skibicki, and the absence of human remains -- the only reasonable outcome -- that might bring some closure to the families of the deceased, means this is indeed a search without a cause except one: the search itself.

Hymie Rubenstein is a retired professor of anthropology, The University of Manitoba, and editor of The REAL Indigenous Issues Newsletter.

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Thanks for reading. For more on indigenous issues read, Soft bigotry leads to hard suffering

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