On Tuesday, 4th April, the Winnipeg Police Service's homicide unit said it started an investigation after staff at the Brady Road landfill in south Winnipeg found the body of 33-year-old Linda Mary Beardy the previous day. Beardy was an indigenous woman from Lake St. Martin Indian Reserve living in Winnipeg..Her cause of death on April 3 was not immediately known. This did not prevent a leader of an indigenous advocacy group from immediately calling for the permanent closure of a landfill where the remains of two other indigenous women were found in the past.."I think given the circumstance, that it should be [closed]. It's not an isolated issue," Grand Chief Cathy Merrick of the Assembly of Manitoba Chiefs told The Canadian Press on April 5.."I know there are lots of [indigenous women] that have been missing throughout time, and I'm pretty sure that some of those women are in the Brady landfill.".Merrick also said "It's shameful. We have to come out looking in landfills for our women …. So much hurt is coming from my province. That is not right for somebody to go dump one of our women in a garbage dump. We are not garbage.".Merrick was told no one had heard from the young unmarried mother of four young children (none under her care,) for about a week before her remains were found. Still, if only out of respect for Beardy’s memory, Merrick should have waited until more evidence was collected by the police, including the most recent material presented on April 6 stating that Beardy climbed into a garbage bin on her own volition..“We are not garbage” echoes the question "Is human life not feasible?" made by a bereaved woman, Cambria Harris, at a Dec. 6, 2022 news conference in Ottawa. She was responding to the original decision of the Winnipeg police not to excavate a rural garbage dump to search for the remains of her mother, because it was originally deemed “not feasible” to do so..This decision, quickly put on hold after considerable protest from the indigenous community, stemmed from a December 1 police murder charge against Jeremy Skibicki, a 35-year-old white man accused of the premeditated murder of four indigenous women. Skibicki was first arrested May 18 and charged with the first-degree murder of Rebecca Contois, aged 24. Her partial remains were found in a garbage bin near the downtown apartment where Skibicki lived. Other body parts were found at the Brady landfill. The bodies of the other three women have not been recovered..No decision has yet been made about excavating the Brady site or one located north of the city believed to contain the remains of the other three women. The City of Winnipeg said in an April 5 statement it's not considering the permanent closure of the Brady Road landfill because it's the only municipally owned and operated landfill in the capital region, and the largest in the area..City council member Markus Chambers said the discovery of Beardy's body points to the "upstream work" the city needs to do to support indigenous communities. According to Chambers, "They're ending up at landfills. They're not happening at landfills. We've got to be able to prevent them or find a way to mitigate against these occurrences happening where they're ending up in the landfill." .Still, identifying the “we” needs much more thoughtful consideration than Chambers implies. As well some “what” and “why” questions need addressing especially given that an April 6 police announcement shows that Beardy was not murdered..Surveillance video showed Beardy, who was alone, leaving a store on the 2200 block of Pembina Highway and entering the bin, which had an open top, just before 11:15 a.m. on April 3. According to Winnipeg Policy Service Chief Danny Smyth, “She was actually observed to climb into the bin on her own. There was some activity observed within the bin, and after a short period of time, there was no further activity observed. She was not observed climbing out of the bin at any time.”.Shortly after 2 p.m., a commercial truck picked up the bin and emptied its contents into the back of the vehicle. The truck then went to Brady Road, where the contents were deposited..These finding did not prevent Christopher Traverse, Chief of Beardy’s home reserve, from opining, “Indigenous people are not trash, and normalizing having their bodies found in dumpsters is disgraceful. It’s traumatizing for our community.”.Yes, “more support is needed for women and girls who come to the city from indigenous communities, including educating people about the challenges of living in an urban setting,” as both he and Merrick suggested..The possibility of suicide, perhaps drug induced, cannot not be ruled out in this tragic event. And yes, “more support is needed for women and girls who come to the city from Indigenous communities, including educating people about the challenges of living in an urban setting,” as both Chambers and Merrick suggested..Federal NDP Leader Jagmeet Singh said the discovery highlights the need to implement the 231 “calls for justice” from the National Inquiry into Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls. But that's a much more questionable assertion..None of these suggestions touch on the most fundamental features underlying the differentially high rate of murders of indigenous women and girls, a rate painfully seven times higher than among non-indigenous women and girls..One of these fundamental features is why in 2023 are we still permitting and supporting the existence of segregated, race-based, poverty stricken, dead-end indian reserves from whose despair, oppression and hopelessness these traumatized and often drug addicted women tried to escape?.According to Niigaan Sinclair, a Winnipeg Free Press columnist and associate professor of native studies at the University of Manitoba, “Linda Beardy may not have been murdered by an individual, but her life ended because of a society’s apathy, racism and policies that offered a refuse bin when what she needed was love.”.For once I agree with Professor Sinclair in broad outline but radically disagree with his implicit assertion that this “love” could ever be found by enacting all the recommendations of the MMIWG report whose calls for justice simply demand even more differential group-based treatment of indigenous people. From their very beginning long before confederation, these aboriginal-only rights and privileges merely created a culture of entitled dependency, rights and privileges that have only entrenched and exacerbated current miseries..While my assertion begs the contentious moral philosophy question of why indigenous cultural survival should be elevated above the survival and well-being of aboriginals as individuals, what seems clear when compared to the experience of millions of immigrants to Canada from countries other than the founding ones, France and Great Britain, the signing of apartheid-like treaties, the enactment of the separatist Indian Act, and other legislation and practices that surely retarded the absorption of western European beliefs, values, and practices have made the first settlers of Canada worse off than they would otherwise be..This can best be seen in the social, economic, and health differentials between indigenous people and other Canadians. Some of the disparities are explicitly mentioned in the final legacy volume of the 2015 Truth and Reconciliation Final Report and constitute the most irrefutable observations in the whole collection of six volumes and accompanying studies. Placed in a comparative national context, these show indigenous people on and off-reserve exhibit the highest rates of criminal behaviour and incarceration; the lowest incomes; the highest rates of unemployment, non-working population numbers, poverty, welfare dependency, and homelessness; the most inferior housing; the highest rates of infant mortality; the lowest life expectancy; the highest disease and illness rates; the highest school dropout rates; the highest rates of child apprehension, fostering, and adoption; the highest levels of suicide; the highest rates of sexual abuse; the highest rates of single motherhood; and, as stated, the highest rates of murdered and missing women..All these deprivations and pathologies were well known when Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau failed in his attempt to enact the provisions of his 1969 White Paper calling for the extinguishment of the racist Indian Act, gradual privatization of reserve land ownership, abolition of the paternalist Department of Indian Affairs, and “removing the specific references to Indians from the constitution… to end the legal distinction between Indians and other Canadians.”.Five hundred years after first contact, it is long past time for indigenous people to be treated exactly like all other Canadians if we hope to end this horrific rate of lethal violence against indigenous women and girls..Stating “We are not garbage” may be nice rhetoric, but it does nothing to explain the murder of indigenous women..Hymie Rubenstein is editor of The REAL Indigenous Issues newsletter and a retired professor of anthropology, the University of Manitoba
