The family of one of four women believed to be a victim of a Winnipeg serial killer held a ceremony days ahead of jury selection in the long-awaited murder trial.
The family of Morgan Harris, 39, held a pipe ceremony at The Forks on Monday. Dozens were there in support.
“It’s to have our elders come together to smoke their pipe to offer prayers to our ancestors to give us strength,” Melissa Robinson, a cousin of Harris, told CBC.
Some of the tobacco held by Harris’s family members at the ceremony will be put into tobacco ties that will be hung in the courtroom for her alleged killer’s murder trial scheduled to start next week, Robinson said.
Jeremy Skibicki, 37, pleaded not guilty in November to all four counts, which involved the deaths of three First Nations women — Harris, Marcedes Myran, 26, and Rebecca Contois, 24 — and a fourth unidentified woman, who was given the name Mashkode Bizhiki’ikwe, or Buffalo Woman, by community members.
Jury selection for the 28-day trial is slated to take place on Thursday.
Robinson says the trial is going to be a “really hard” time for her family.
“I think they’ve prepared us as best they could with some of the details that we’re going to hear,” she said.
“But of course, there’s always going to be so much more, right? And you’re not really fully prepared until you’re sitting in that room and you have to hear it first hand.”
She called the Monday pipe ceremony “preparation.”
“It was a good idea to do it a week in advance to give us time to just kind of absorb everything, you know, sit with our feelings and really just mentally prepare ourselves for next week,” she said.
“I’m going to ask that the general public, you know, just kind of hold us in their thoughts and their prayers.”