‘It’s tragic that her family … hasn’t found their loved one,’ MMIWG advocate says
CBC Indigenous: Just steps away from the Canadian Museum for Human Rights, red dresses blow in the wind. They serve as a symbol of missing and murdered Indigenous women and girls in Canada, including the four police allege were killed by Jeremy Skibicki.
The names of three of those four women are known: Morgan Harris, Marcedes Myran and Rebecca Contois.
But there’s also an unidentified woman known as Mashkode Bizhiki’ikwe, or Buffalo Woman— a name given to her by the community.
“It saddens me for sure that she doesn’t have a family out there advocating for her and fighting for her to come home, but me and my family have said her name plenty of times,” said Marcedes Myran’s sister Jorden Myran. “We are fighting just as much to get her home as we’re fighting to get my sister home.”
CBC spoke with Jorden next to the museum, among the red dresses. The area has been turned into a camp named for her sister. It’s one of two built as reminders to search for the women. The other, Camp Morgan, has been situated near the Brady Road landfill since December. The fight Jorden referred to is the nearly year-long battle by families, some First Nations leaders and advocates to get two Manitoba landfills searched for remains.
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Police have said they believe the bodies of Myran and Harris are in the Prairie Green landfill, north of Winnipeg. But that landfill was never searched. Partial remains of Contois were found at the Brady Road landfill in June 2022, weeks after some of her remains were discovered in North Kildonan.
If police have a theory about where Buffalo Woman’s body is, they have not said so publicly. In fact, very few details about her have been made public.
That hasn’t stopped George Robinson from trying to find out who she is. Robinson, who is married to Morgan Harris’s cousin, told CBC he has been taking part in community searches for missing people for years. When Harris went missing, before police announced they believed she was a homicide victim, Robinson searched for her.
When police released details about the unidentified woman connected to the Skibicki case, he tried to find out who she was. He said he handed out posters with information about Buffalo Woman and estimates he had hundreds of conversations, hoping to glean useful information that could help the case.
“We hit all the shelters,” Robinson said. “We went down Main Street, where all the most vulnerable population is. We went into the North End, West End. We went down to every single encampment, you know, that we could find…. Not only that, we went into some pretty sketchy buildings.”
George Robinson describes his search for Buffalo Woman’s identity
Watch | The search for information about Buffalo Woman: Duration 1:39
When Winnipeg police said they didn’t know the identity of an alleged homicide victim of Jeremy Skibicki, George Robinson started searching for information that could help the case.
Click on the following link to view the video:
Police have said they believe Buffalo Woman is Indigenous, in her mid-20s with an average build, and that she wore a reversible Baby Phat jacket. Police have also said their investigation suggested she was the first of the four women to be killed, on or around March 15, 2022.
Last February, one father of a missing woman told CBC that police had determined his daughter was not the unidentified woman.
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Robinson said he and one of Harris’s daughters still spend time looking at missing cases from outside the province to see if there’s a link. “We don’t stop,” he said.
They’re not the only ones questioning whether the woman is originally from Manitoba.
Sandra Delaronde, an advocate for missing and murdered Indigenous women and girls, said she thinks it’s important to search beyond Canada’s borders.
There’s been an increase in human trafficking and Winnipeg is one of the places it happens, she said. “It’s tragic that her family doesn’t know, hasn’t found their loved one,” Delaronde said. “And I think that she’s probably been a victim of human trafficking from outside, even outside of Canada.”
CBC asked to speak with Winnipeg police to learn more about the work that has gone into identifying the unknown woman. A spokesperson only said “the investigation is ongoing and the matter is before the courts.”
Michael Arntfield, a criminologist and professor at Western University, said this is possibly a type of case referred to as the missing missing. “So they are missing, they’re met with foul play according to the police theory, but no one has reported them missing,” said Arntfield. “They’re a missing person whose record of that disappearance is not there.”
Arntfield said he can’t think of a case in Canada involving a murder charge being laid and prosecuted where there is no body and no identity. “A no body homicide and a no name homicide — very rare,” he said.
Skibicki pleaded not guilty to four counts of first-degree murder Monday during the first day of pretrial motions in his case. His trial is scheduled to start at the end of April.
In the meantime, Robinson wants to start an around-the-clock search team, separate from police, that will search for people as soon as they are reported missing. He hasn’t given up hope that Buffalo Woman will be identified.
While it’s not known where the Buffalo Woman’s remains are, Jorden Myran said she’ll keep advocating for both the Prairie Green and the Brady Road landfills to be searched. “We’re doing everything we can to bring all of these women home.”
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Alana Cole, Reporter, CBC Manitoba
Alana Cole is a reporter at CBC Manitoba. Email: alana.cole@cbc.ca
With files from Cameron MacLean