We all suffer when one of us goes missing

I remember giving a talk just before the 2023 Manitoba election — an election almost completely defined on the question of whether the remains of four Indigenous women, murdered by a serial killer, were worth searching for in landfills.

After the gathering, a criminal lawyer, whom I won’t name, came up to me.

“I know why the police, lawyers and politicians don’t want landfills searched in this province,” this lawyer said. “Because of what else they’ll find.”

On Monday, the Manitoba government-led search began at the Brady Road Landfill for Mashkode Bizhiki’ikwe (Buffalo Woman), also known as Ashlee Shingoose.

Positively identified after previously being unknown, Shingoose’s father Albert has asked that the name Mashkode Bizhiki’ikwe continue to be used alongside Ashlee’s name.

So, starting this week — as it was during the successful search a year ago for Morgan Harris and Marcedes Myran at the Prairie Green Landfill — Manitobans and the Shingoose family wait to hear if her remains are found.

The search will continue for at least six months and the provincial government has committed to extending it.

If you pray, this is the time. If you lay tobacco, offer your gift. Whatever you do in your tradition to send love, it will help.

This brings us to Tanya Nepinak, whose remains are almost certainly in that same place. She has been missing since 2011. It’s believed her remains were placed in a garbage bin that eventually ended up at the Brady Road landfill.

Shawn Lamb was convicted of manslaughter in the deaths of Carolyn Sinclair and Lorna Blacksmith. A second-degree murder charge in relation to Nepinak was stayed due to a “lack of evidence.”

While this is not the first search for Nepinak, it will be the most extensive.

In 2012, Winnipeg police performed a six-day search at the Brady Road Landfill; and virtually no one but Nepinak’s friends and family have looked for her since then.

Now the search begins – even as the odds seem impossible and her remains could be conceivably anywhere in a 790-hectare debris field.

That search, which will almost certainly take place afterwards and outside where Shingoose likely is, may come up with other answers, too.

Nearly every First Nation in this province has had at least one of their daughters, sisters, cousins, aunties, mothers or grandmothers go missing. In some First Nations, such as Sagkeeng First Nation, dozens are missing.

This is not to mention the many missing Indigenous men and boys in this province.

This has all been reported before. Manitoba has one of the highest rates of murdered and missing Indigenous people on the continent; many cases have gone cold.

The reasons for this, as I’ve written many times, can be boiled down to several factors, highlighted by a toxic mixture of societal apathy, systemic paralysis, and widescale belief that Indigenous people — and women and girls and two-spirit people in particular — aren’t human beings on par with everyone else.

If Indigenous people were treated as human beings, one could say with certainty that none exist in landfills – but one cannot say this.

So, we search.

We search until we treat each other better, see one another, and commit to making sure there are no debates on Indigenous humanity again.

We search though because none of our circles — I repeat, none — is complete.

In Anishinaabe teachings, we have a saying: Gidinawendimin, or “we are all related.”

It means that everyone has a place.

Regardless of where you come from, what you think, or who you vote for, you are a small but significant part of a universal circle made up of webs of interdependence, kinship, and relationships.

When one part of the circle goes absent, no matter how big or small, everyone suffers.

This is not some altruistic, new age, or utopian idea, it’s a fact.

Without everyone our lodges and homes can’t be fully built, food and medicine can’t be entirely collected, and stories and laughter can’t be shared.

When a part of the circle is missing there is a constant, eternal absence — a hole, gap and space that can never be filled by anyone else.

The circle is weaker or, worse, has to grow smaller to keep itself together.

When an Indigenous person goes missing in Manitoba, every single individual from every other culture and community is lesser — and vice versa.

This is why we search.

We search not because we are “woke,” “culturally aware,” or “committed to diversity, equity or inclusion” but because none of us is fully human when one of us is lost.

niigaan.sinclair@freepress.mb.ca