Firekeeper watches over spirits rising at landfill search protesters’ Camp Marcedes By: Cierra Bettens Posted: 6:22 PM CDT Monday, Aug. 14, 2023 Last Modified: 9:28 AM CDT Tuesday, Aug. 15, 2023 Updates

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 14/08/2023 (1131 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

“The flame is actually the ancestors dancing.”

Those words are spoken by one of the people who has taken on the responsibility of ensuring the sacred fire keeps burning on the grounds of the Canadian Museum for Human Rights. He introduces himself by his spirit name, Shining Goldstar.

The fire at “Camp Marcedes” — named for Marcedes Myran, a missing Indigenous woman believed to have been among the victims of an alleged Winnipeg serial killer last year — has been burning for nearly a month.

They are demanding a search of a private landfill just north of the city, believed to contain Myran’s remains, along with those of Morgan Harris and another unidentified suspected victim who Indigenous elders have named Mashkode Bizhiki’ikwe (Buffalo Woman).

Protesters are still at “Camp Morgan” at Brady Road landfill, Winnipeg’s municipal dump, where remains of Rebecca Contois — believed to be a fourth victim — were located by police after body parts were discovered in an East Kildonan garbage bin in May 2022.

Jeremy Skibicki has pleaded not guilty to four counts of first-degree murder and is scheduled to go on trial in 2023.

“The smoke is the spirits rising,” Shining Goldstar says, staring at the fire. “A lot of this stuff is deep, spiritual stuff that’s been lost. A lot of elders don’t want to pass it down anymore because they feel the next generation won’t carry it forward.”

Red handprints colour the concrete on the nearby Provencher Bridge. Red dresses fastened onto crosses sway in the morning breeze. Red ribbons dangle from trees. All draw attention to the horror that is missing and murdered Indigenous women, girls and two-spirited people.

“That represents our women that are missing. That’s a lot of ribbon,” protester Daniella Peltier says. “Some of them are my cousins.”

Premier Heather Stefanson’s government has refused to support a search of the private Prairie Green Landfill, which has been estimated to cost between $84 million and $184 million and could take several years.

Manitoba’s NDP announced several commitments to improve safety and the well-being of Indigenous women. Party leader Wab Kinew promised that if the New Democrats form government after the Oct. 3 provincial election, they plan to reinstate a special adviser to the government on MMIWG2S+ issues, set up around-the-clock drop-in centres and take action on the 231 calls to action listed in the final report of the National Inquiry into Murdered and Missing Indigenous Women and Girls.

Shining Goldstar says Camp Marcedes has become more than a site of protest. It’s a place of unity and reconnection.

“One of the signs here says ‘rekindling the flame.’ That’s what this is all about,” he says. “It’s to search the landfill, but it’s also rekindling that flame, to actually care about the elders.”

At the camp, he’s referring to Elder Marcel French, who worked in the funeral home industry and knows a lot about the grieving process the families of the deceased are going through.

“To be in that kind of industry, you have to have compassion. You have to have an understanding of the grieving process, the loss process,” French says, boiling a cast-iron kettle of water over a grill. “I understand from a different perspective of what it means not to have closure for a family.”

He says the provincial government’s inaction on the landfill search may be rooted in fear of what it might find.

“There may be more bodies than what they were initially looking for,” he says, removing his ballcap and glasses for a smudge, using burning sage and cedar offered by Shining Goldstar.

French says he believes the world is watching what is happening here. People from all walks of life have been in the community. Tourists from all over the world have stumbled upon the tents and red dresses, purposefully or not, and learned about the missing women believed to be in the landfill.

During the recent Winnipeg Police and Fire Games, officers from nations around the globe stopped to talk and were shocked when French told them the landfill had not been searched, he says.

“We had fire chiefs and police chiefs come back here and say, ‘This is so wrong. You’re looking for three people…. If this happened back home…we would be looking,’” he says.

“We’ve lost the compassion in our government at all levels.”

cierra.bettens@freepress.mb.ca

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