“I have been in care since I was two days old.” Staci, an Indigenous 21 year old woman tells me as she cradles her baby. The rain is falling on a tarp overhead that’s meant to protect food and supplies from the elements. We’re at a place called “Camp Marcedes,” the name given to the area near the confluence of the Red and Assiniboine rivers in Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada, where a sacred fire was lit in memory of Marcedes Myran. Marcedes was one of four Indigenous women murdered by Jeremy Skibicki who was sentenced to four life sentences on August 28, 2024 for the murders of Morgan Harris, Rebecca Contois, Mercedes Myran, and an unidentified fourth victim named by members of the local Indigenous community as Buffalo Woman.
“Me and my daughter come here a lot. Even if it’s raining, it’s just peaceful.” Staci initially came here to show her support as one of her own close friends was murdered the previous Spring. Since then, she’s found a sense of community here. “Nobody has given me a direct answer as to why I was taken,” Staci says. While we wait out the weather, she tells me the story of how she was apprehended from her Indigenous mother at birth by Child and Family Services, the government agency empowered with authority over children’s welfare.
Staci was targeted for a “birth alert” before she was born. A “birth alert” is when a social worker flags an expecting parent to hospital staff to apprehend a newborn without notice. There is little information given to the public about what criteria is sufficient to trigger such an apprehension. “They told my biological family that they moved me out of the country. They told me that my biological parents passed away,” Staci said, accusing state officials of efforts to prevent family reunification. According to recent census figures, Indigenous children comprise nearly 8% of all Canadian children under 15, but more than 53% of children in foster care.
Staci adds that her first child was also apprehended, just as she had been. When she tried to reclaim custody, she questioned what circumstances caused her birth alert and what she can change so that her baby can be returned to her. There were no answers. She has since had another child, the one she’s cradling before me. She wonders why she was fit to mother this child, but not the other? While the state process for apprehending her baby was swift, her process for regaining custody meanders through the machinations of the public courts.
In 2021, a wave of class action lawsuits began rolling out across Canada’s provinces, seeking to put an end to birth alert practices nationwide. Even though these policies have been declared illegal in some provinces, the practice remains ongoing. The anguish of birth alert policies isn’t unrelated to the reason why Staci and others have come to gather at Camp Marcedes. After the murderer was caught, he confessed to leaving his victims’ bodies in dumpsters for disposal in the city landfill, where they are believed to remain to the present day. For two years the government refused to conduct a search to retrieve them. Camp Marcedes arose in part to raise awareness of missing and murdered Indigenous women, girls, 2Spirit persons, and others (MMIWG2S+).
For Staci, government indifference to the women whose bodies are stuck in the landfill is a continuation of hundreds of years of colonial policy aimed at eliminating Indigenous cultures, one that has had a deeply painful impact on the women and children. “They changed my last name so my family couldn’t find me,” Staci says. When she finally made contact with her biological family, she said her grandmother told her they never gave up looking for her.
Throughout the 20th century, more than 150,000 First Nations, Inuit, and Métis Nation children were taken from their families and communities and placed into what are called “residential schools.” These facilities were notoriously underfunded, rampant with physical and sexual abuse, malnutrition, inadequate health facilities, and deaths. These institutions were not relics of the distant past: over 139 residential schools operated throughout the 20th century, with the last federally-run institution closing in the 1990s. Their mission was to eliminate Indigenous culture—giving children new Christian names, forbidding them from speaking their native language, and expressing their cultural rituals or habits, like dancing and singing. The principal education they received was generally in training for farm and domestic work to serve as laborers.
Thousands of Indigenous children died in these places throughout the 20th century.
It wasn’t until 1990, when the Grand Chief of the Assembly of Manitoba Chiefs, Phil Fontaine, spoke publicly about the abuses he experienced in residential school institutions, that a movement of thousands of other survivors arose, leading to what became the largest class action lawsuit in Canadian history. A settlement of that lawsuit led to the creation of the National Truth and Reconciliation Commission, which documented the accounts of survivors and attempted to unearth the extent of the abuses that transpired at these facilities. The commission collected evidence of thousands of children confirmed to have died at residential schools with thousands of others unaccounted for.
On May 27, 2021, the Tk’emlups te Secwépemc First Nation announced preliminary findings of an unmarked burial site of 215 children at the Kamloops Residential School in British Columbia. As recently as August 30, 2024, it was announced that the Opaskwayak Cree Nation found evidence of unmarked burials on the grounds of a former residential school in North West Manitoba. An effort to search other school grounds for children’s graves remains underway. While the Truth and Reconciliation Commission attempted to conduct an evidence-based inquiry about the extent of children lost or missing during the residential school era, what can’t be counted or measured is the impact that taking children has had on these Nations, their communities , and their families.
What would your life look like if the police entered the homes in your neighborhood and took the children? What if you were one of those taken? Or one of the parents left behind?
The impact is intergenerational. As Prime Minister Justin Trudeau acknowledged in the wake of the Kamloops burial discovery, “What happened decades ago isn’t part of our history, it is an irrefutable part of our present.” But survivors find healing with one another. As Staci remarked about the hope she sees in the people she met at Camp Marcedes, “Kindness in this world isn’t dead. There is room for change.” As for those who perpetrate the actions that have caused suffering to herself and her people, Staci framed it as a matter of choice: “Everybody can have a heart. They just choose not to.”
About the author: JR Howell is a dedicated attorney with a passion for making a positive impact in the world. His firm embodies integrity, professionalism, and a genuine commitment to advocating for the rights of marginalized communities and promoting equality on a global scale.
