Potential landfill search reopens old wounds for aunt of woman who went missing over a decade ago

Sue Caribou often sits by the window in her residence, looking down Main Street and sometimes she thinks she sees her niece, who went missing in 2011.

The debate around a potential police search of Prairie Green Landfill, north of Winnipeg's Perimeter Highway, for the remains of two missing Indigenous women, is making Caribou relive the trauma she experienced more than a decade ago.

"You can't have closure when you don't have a body," she said Thursday, fighting back tears.

The Winnipeg Police Service spent six days searching for Tanya Nepinak, 31, at the Brady Road landfill in 2012, but she was never found.

Caribou said it was challenging for her to get police to search the dump for her niece.

"It began fast, and it also ended fast. They make us happy, and then break another promise, and then we're right back to where we were," she said of the search. 

"We don't have our loved ones and we're still searching for our loved ones. It's hard to accept your loved one being in the dump like trash. Our women are not trash."

Caribou said police offered to erect a monument in honour of Nepinak at the landfill, which she still scoffs at.

"There is no way any human being belongs to be left by the dump. And I'm not going to have a monument at the dump for my loved one. That's an insult to me and my loved one," she said.

And there's also the mental and physical toll the search took on Caribou.

"You feel very devastated. You have nightmares again and again. You're not eating," she said.

Charges were stayed against Shawn Lamb — convicted in the death of two other Indigenous women — in part because Nepinak was never found.

Caribou feels like police gave up searching for Nepinak a long time ago.

"At one point, too, they said they didn't have enough people to search," Caribou said. "I figured, if they need people to search, I'm sure our people will be willing to search."