Family honours slaying victim in ceremony at landfill

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This article was published 23/12/2022 (988 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Before embarking on a journey of remembrance in the aching cold Friday evening, family members of a slaying victim put cedar, a sacred medicine used for healing, in their shoes.

They took a bus into the depths of the Brady Road landfill, on the southern limits of the city, to hold an Indigenous ceremony to honour Morgan Harris, a 39-year-old suspected victim of accused serial killer Jeremey Skibicki.

“We’re going to go up there with an elder… and we’re going to put a spirit plate down and bless the ground and hold ceremony, said Cambria Harris, the victim’s 21-year-old daughter.

Advocates for missing and murdered Indigenous women, girls and two-spirit people have set up a blockade camp at the landfill and 4R depot, which have been closed since Sunday afternoon. They want the city-owned site searched for the remains of Harris and another victim, 26-year-old Marcedes Myran.

“It’s important to ask our ancestors and creators to guide us on this journey and bring these women home, so that we’re able to honour them and give them proper burials,” Harris said.

Skibicki is accused of killing four women last spring: Harris, Myran, Rebecca Contois and an unidentified woman named Buffalo Woman.

Contois’s partial remains were found at Brady during a police search in June. Some remains had been found in a garbage bin in North Kildonan a month earlier.

Police said they believe the remains of Harris and Myran were disposed of in a different landfill: the privately owned Prairie Green Landfill north of Winnipeg. On Dec. 1, police held a news conference to explain the difficulty of searching that site. They said it was not feasible due to the amount of time that had passed and the tonnes of compacted waste that had been dumped there since mid-May.

Cambria Harris, and her cousin Melissa Normand, said they think the body of their loved one and the other two victims could instead be in the same area of Brady where Contois was found.

“We’re going up to Brady landfill, the lot where Rebecca’s remains were… found, and where my mother might be as well,” said Cambria Harris.

Normand said the camp is settling in for the long haul. The Southern Chiefs’ Organization has donated an ice-fishing shack that sleeps six people, and portable toilets were delivered Friday.

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“Until our women are brought home, our warriors are determined to stay here,” Normand said.

They also plan to hold a traditional ceremony at the Prairie Green landfill.

“We want to take the time to honour both areas, so here and also Prairie Green,” said Normand.

erik.pindera@freepress.mb.ca

Twitter: @erik_pindera

Erik Pindera
Reporter

Erik Pindera is a reporter for the Free Press, mostly focusing on crime and justice. The born-and-bred Winnipegger attended Red River College Polytechnic, wrote for the community newspaper in Kenora, Ont. and reported on television and radio in Winnipeg before joining the Free Press in 2020.  Read more about Erik.

Every piece of reporting Erik produces is reviewed by an editing team before it is posted online or published in print — part of the Free Press‘s tradition, since 1872, of producing reliable independent journalism. Read more about Free Press’s history and mandate, and learn how our newsroom operates.