PRINCE RUPERT, Canada: A windswept pile of trash. Beneath it lies a body. A body dumped by a serial killer and left in a landfill for years. It's the latest chapter in a long history of violence against Indigenous women in Canada.
Morgan Harris and Marcedes Mylan were raped, murdered, dismembered and dumped in Winnipeg, Manitoba, and police believe their bodies are buried deep beneath the Prairie Green Landfill.
The remains of another victim, Rebecca Comtois, were found in two separate locations, a city trash bin and another landfill, while the remains of a fourth unidentified woman in her 20s, known as the Buffalo Woman, remain missing.
The suspected killer, Jeremy Skibicki, now 37 and with ties to white supremacists, confessed and went on trial in 2022. He is due to be sentenced next month.
However, the families have not been able to bury the bodies as exhumation work has yet to begin.
Indigenous women are disproportionately targets of violence in Canada, and authorities have been accused of paying little attention to their plight and often lacking protection.
Instead, they end up “in the trash,” said Morgan Harris' 19-year-old daughter, Elle Harris.
A member of the Long Plains tribe, Elle wears a traditional skirt and wears her hair in a long braid.
Her mother had a difficult life, she said, including losing custody of her five children due to drug addiction and being homeless for years.
“My mother was taken from me so suddenly, as if nothing had happened. I want to see her again, to talk to her again,” she told AFP.
Instead, she and her family have been maintaining a vigil near the Prairie Green Landfill, where they have set up tents, a sacred fire, red dresses and a banner asking for sympathy: “How would you feel if that was your daughter?”
For months, they take turns staying in the makeshift camp during Winnipeg's windy winter, “wanting to prove that we are something special, that we are not trash, that we can't just be thrown in the trash,” Elle said.
It's part of a campaign to pressure authorities to excavate the site, which has remained in use since Skibicki's confession, with new trucks arriving regularly and stacked on top of existing ones.
The green light for drilling was finally given in late 2023, shortly after Winnipeg elected Canada's first Indigenous premier, Wab Kinew.
But searchers will have to sift through tonnes of trash and building debris, and independent experts say such work carries significant risks because of the presence of toxic materials such as asbestos.
It could ultimately take years and cost tens of millions of dollars.
Morgan Harris' family has vowed to maintain a vigil until her body is recovered.
Prosecutors have said Skibicki targeted Indigenous women he met at homeless shelters, and the trial, which began in late April, is scheduled to end on July 11.
At the time of the arrest, then-Minister of Crown and Indigenous Relations Marc Miller said the incident was part of a “devastating historical legacy” for Indigenous women in Canada that “has repercussions to this day.”
“Nobody can stand in front of you and say with any confidence that this will never happen again. I think that's kind of shameful,” he said.
Indigenous women make up the vast majority of victims of femicide in Canada.
Despite making up just 5% of the population, women account for roughly one-fifth of all women killed in gender-related homicides in the country, according to official statistics recorded over the 11 years to 2021.
Specifically, that year the rate of gender-related homicides against Indigenous victims was more than three times higher than the overall rate of such homicides against girls and women, according to the report.
“Canada is seen as a rights-respecting country,” said Hilda Anderson Piltz, a longtime activist for Indigenous women.
But “the fact that we are being disposed of like trash in landfills is a clear indication that something is wrong in this country.”
In 2019, a national commission went so far as to describe the murders and disappearances of thousands of indigenous women over the years as a “genocide.”
Isolated, marginalized and deeply affected by intergenerational trauma, they face disproportionate violence due to “state actions and inactions rooted in colonialism and colonial ideologies based on a presumption of superiority”, the commission concluded.
It's a conclusion shared by some of the families of Mr. Skibicki's victims.
Great-grandmother Donna Bartlett, who is raising her children in a small, cluttered home outside Winnipeg, acknowledges Mercedes Mylan's young children don't understand why she's at the dump.
The 66-year-old recalled Ms Mercedes as a kind, bubbly girl who loved to joke around.
She laments the reluctance of authorities to search the landfill.
“If[the women]had been white, they would have done it in a heartbeat,” she said.
Further west, in British Columbia, there is a hundreds of miles of road known as the “Highway of Tears,” which activists say is a grim memorial to Canada's many ways of failing Indigenous women.
The nature here is spectacular: snow-capped mountains, giant trees, the winding Skeena River, waterfalls, and abundant wildlife, including foxes, bears, and eagles.
But there's an unnatural sight on the side of the highway: a red dress nailed to a pillar symbolizing the missing women, a faded photo of a girl with a bright smile, and a message offering a reward for any clue leading to their whereabouts.
Since the 1960s, as many as 50 women and several men have gone missing along the 450-mile (725-kilometer) highway that runs between Prince Rupert and Prince George on the Pacific coast near Alaska.
All were young people, believed to be Indigenous, and many had gone missing while hitchhiking or walking home along Highway 16. No community in the region was spared.
Tamara Chipman, of Wet'sewet'en First Nation, was heading to Prince Rupert to meet a friend when she was last seen hitchhiking on September 21, 2005. She was 22 years old and the mother of a young boy.
Her aunt, Gladys Radek, said she was a vivacious young woman who “loved speedboats, fishing and life” in an area rife with social breakdown and drugs.
In isolated, poor communities surrounded by dense forests and connected only by a single highway, with no proper telephone network or public transport, many young people are forced to hitchhike for transport.
They often encounter temporary workers, mostly single, highly paid men, who have come to local mines in search of work.
Chipman's case, like most of the disappearances along this route, remains unsolved.
When Lana Derrick went missing from the area 25 years ago, “we struggled initially to get support from the RCMP to get this case taken seriously,” said her cousin, Wanda Good, referring to the Royal Canadian Mounted Police.
As many families have noted, efforts to locate women who have been branded drug addicts, prostitutes or alcoholics can be half-hearted at best.
In some cases, families said they organized their own searches for missing loved ones or witnesses.
In 2018, the head of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police acknowledged to a national commission that for too many Indigenous families, “the Royal Canadian Mounted Police was not the police service you needed at this terrible time in your lives.”
Research has shown there is deep-rooted mistrust between police and Indigenous people that dates back decades to when the Canadian government used police as an armed force to impose forced assimilation on Indigenous peoples.
At the Royal Canadian Mounted Police's British Columbia headquarters outside Vancouver, veteran homicide detective Constable Wayne Clary is trying to unravel the tragedy on the Highway of Tears.
“The north is very isolated and women, not just indigenous women but other women, are making themselves available to men who prey on them,” he said.
He denies accusations of botched investigations but acknowledges “there may have been a lack of communication in the past.”
Clary is part of the E-Pana unit, which was created in 2005, more than 30 years after the disappearances began, to “determine whether a serial killer or group of killers are responsible.”
The unit's list includes 18 women linked to 13 murders and five disappearances between 1969 and 2006. So far, no links between the cases have been confirmed.
The investigation is ongoing, but no new homicide cases have been handled by the task force. The last case dates back to November of last year, that of Chelsea Kuoh, a 29-year-old Indigenous woman who was reported missing after leaving her home on Saik'es First Nation.
Goode said there has been progress in recent years, with police now listening to families and new relay antennas being installed for mobile communications on roads.
“We are making progress, but it's very slow, at a snail's pace,” she said.
But Radek, 69, believes this is a collective tragedy the country is refusing to face.
Speaking slowly and gravely, her voice occasionally breaking with anger, she describes how she began traveling across the country “to tell the stories of women whose destinies were broken, to be a voice for families whose lives were silenced.”
Her battered van is covered with photos of the missing, and as she passes through villages along the Highway of Tears, residents often stop her to talk.
She now fights outside of Canada, taking part in conferences and demonstrations to raise awareness of the plight of women.
“I'm going to keep looking,” she says.
