How the ‘Winnipeg’ landfill search came to be: A timeline

During a press conference last week following a discovery of possible human remains at the Prairie Green landfill, “Manitoba” Premier Wab Kinew told reporters that the families of missing and murdered Indigenous women “really made us do the right thing.”

It took less than three months of searching for Morgan Harris, 39, and Marcedes Myran, 26, which involved looking at dates on milk cartons and addresses on envelopes to connect with the dates the women were killed.

Families are still waiting for the possible remains to be identified, which is expected to take at least two weeks.

Harris’s daughter Elle told media on Thursday that: “If people would have just listened to us in the first place, we would have brought these women home a lot sooner, they didn’t deserve to sit in that landfill.”

A timeline of events since 2022 shines a light on how advocates pushed for accountability, and for a search to happen:

Serial killer Jeremy Skibicki murdered Marcedes Myran, 26, from Long Plain First Nation; Rebecca Contois, 24, from O-Chi-Chak-Ko-Sipi First Nation; Morgan Harris, 39, from Long Plain; and Mashkode Bizhiki’ikwe, also known as Buffalo Woman, whose identity is still unknown.

The Winnipeg Police believe that Buffalo Woman was killed on or around March 15, 2022. The other three women’s lives were taken in May 2022. Contois’s partial remains were found in a trash bin, on May 16, 2022, which led the investigation to Brady landfill on the southside of the city, where a search started on June 2, 2022. It’s believed that she was killed a day or two before she was found in the garbage receptacle.

Mashkode Bizhiki’ikwe, also known as Buffalo Woman, was given the name through a posthumous, traditional naming ceremony.

The only evidence found about Buffalo Woman’s identity was a reversible Baby Phat jacket — a photo of it was shared on social media and posters were distributed throughout the city. 

Melissa Robinson and her husband George had searched for Robinson’s cousin Morgan Harris throughout Winnipeg’s Main Street strip, looking around the shelters and soup kitchens she frequented after they noticed that Harris was not heard from and no one had seen her, she was missing. The last time she was seen was on May 1, 2022 and it’s believed she was murdered around that time. 

Later that year on December 1, 2022, the Winnipeg Police Service charged Skibicki in connection with the deaths. 

A day later, on December 2, 2022, the former police chief Danny Smyth told the court at Skibicki’s first appearance, that because time had passed that the police were not going to search the landfill. Indigenous leaders soon called for Smyth’s resignation.

On December 6, 2022, the Myran and Harris families, along with First Nations chiefs organizations, held a media conference at Parliament Hill after the Winnipeg Police said that they would not search for the women in Prairie Green landfill. 

On their way to “Ottawa,” the police waited for the Harris family at the airport where Melissa Robinson recalled being shown a PowerPoint presentation and it was explained by police that a search wasn’t feasible, citing hazardous materials such as asbestos that would make it unsafe.

Supporting the families from the start of the mobilization calling to search the landfill, were the late Cathy Merrick, grand chief of the Assembly of Manitoba Chiefs, along with Kyra Wilson, who at the time was the Long Plain First Nation chief, and is now grand chief of the AMC.

They urged the former premier Heather Stefanson to enable a landfill search.

Smyth apologized and the WPS joined a committee led by the families to conduct a feasibility study of the landfill search.

Then on December 18, 2022, the Harris family, along with a group called the First Nations Indigenous Warriors decided to start a sacred fire outside the gates of Brady Landfill. It was an encampment that became known as Camp Morgan. The fire continued for two years.

In May 2023, the feasibility study was released citing a cost of $184-million and a timeline of up to three years to search Prairie Green.

On July 5, 2023 former premier Heather Stefanson told news media that it was too risky to search. 

A day later on July 6, 2023, Camp Morgan started a blockade on the road leading to Brady landfill, demanding the provincial and federal governments to search for the women at Prairie Green. It was the camp’s blockade across the Brady landfill road which drew national and international attention. Round dances, marches and rallies sprang up in solidarity.

They held the line until July 18, 2023, after a judge granted the city a temporary injunction ordering them to remove the blockade, which was then removed by police and city workers. 

Around the same time as the injunction was enforced, sacred fire coals were transferred from Camp Morgan at Brady landfill, to the newly formed Camp Marcedes which held space behind the Canadian Museum for Human Rights in downtown “Winnipeg.”

Months later, in October 2023, Kinew became premier, who in his campaign, promised that he would implement the landfill search.

For months, the Harris and Myran families and their supporters waited for Kinew to deliver on his promise, which came in March 2024, when he said that the province and feds would fund a search. Demonstrations happened throughout this time calling on government support to #SearchTheLandfill.

A series of hearings continued from April 2024, through July 11, 2024, when Justice Glen Joyal found Skibicki guilty of first degree murder for the violent deaths of Myran, Contois, Harris and Mashkode Bizhiki’ikwe, also known as Buffalo Woman.

On August 28, 2024, Joyal sentenced Skibicki to four concurrent life sentences with no chance of parole for 25 years.

A hiring process for the landfill search began in September 2024.

October 23, 2024 is when Stage 3 of the landfill search started by excavating a top layer of waste above the targeted zone for searching. Construction on the search facility continued.  

Stage 4 of the landfill search at Prairie Green began on December 2, 2024, where workers began to comb through 20,300 of excavated waste that came into the facility between May 9 and May 21, 2022. It is being conducted in an area the size of four football fields, 100 by 200 metres, and at a maximum 10 metres depth.

On December 18, 2024, the Camp Morgan sacred fire was officially extinguished, with a ceremony, on the second year anniversary of it being lit on December 18, 2022.

Potential human remains were found at Prairie Green on February 26, 2025.