The two women had been missing for more than seven months when police called their loved ones to a meeting.
The families of Morgan Harris and Marcedes Myran had taped up missing person posters and canvassed the areas around Winnipeg, Manitoba, where the Indigenous women spent time. No bit of intel was too small for cases R22-23037 and R22-50231. “Have you seen this woman?” they’d ask anyone. Some said they had.
But those tips led nowhere. So as the meeting with police last December approached, Kirstin Witwicki, a cousin of Harris’s, was uneasy but holding out hope. “You make bargains in your head,” she said, “to rationalize things that you know don’t make logical sense.”
What came next was a grim “blur of information.”
Harris, 39, and Myran, 26, members of the Long Plain First Nation, had been the victims of a serial killer who had preyed on Indigenous women, police said. Investigators had determined in June, soon after their disappearances, that their remains had been dumped in the Prairie Green landfill north of Winnipeg, police said, but it wasn’t safe or feasible to search it.
Other forensic analysts dispute that conclusion. Now the families are locked in a dispute with authorities over whether to search — and the treatment of murdered and missing Indigenous women and girls generally.
Refusing to search, family members and their advocates say, betrays Canada’s pledges to reconcile with Indigenous people and address the disproportionately high rates of violence against Indigenous women and girls, which a national inquiry recently called a “genocide.”
“We can easily talk about reconciliation,” said Cathy Merrick, grand chief of the Assembly of Manitoba Chiefs. “But there’s no action with it, so it’s meaningless.”
Canadian officials have “made so many promises to Indigenous people,” said Jorden Myran, who was raised with Marcedes and calls her a sister. “This is just showing that nothing has changed. … If this was a White woman in the landfill, there would have been no question that there would have been a search.”
