Seven Fallen Feathers: Chapter 5: The Hollowness of Not Knowing Summary & Analysis

Talaga travels to Maryanne Panacheese’s home on the Mishkeegogamang First Nation reserve—a onetime colonial settlement that is actually two reserves joined into one. The Panacheeses have lived here since the early 1900s, and they still receive the same four-dollar annual payouts that their ancestors did when they signed over their land in a 1905 treaty. Locals often refer to Mish as “Oz”—but this Oz is not a “merry place.” A thousand people live on the reservation, yet there are no places of employment or grocery stores. Few people have cars, and though the reserve is surrounded by lakes and streams, the water piped into homes here is tainted and unusable.

After Maryanne’s son Paul died in 2006, Maryanne divorced her abusive husband and moved here. Maryanne is a survivor of the residential schools herself—she attended a school in Southern Ontario with children from a completely different cultural group. After her second year at the school, during a visit home, 10-year-old Maryanne watched her older sister Sarah get taken away by police officers who sent her to a special “truancy” school in the south. To this day, none of Sarah’s 11 siblings know what became of her—she hasn’t been seen since 1995. She is now one of the 1,181 Murdered and Missing Indigenous Women and Girls. Maryanne fears that Sarah was a victim of serial killer Robert Pickton, who confessed to murdering 49 Indigenous women and processing their bodies through a meat grinder on his British Columbia property.

Not only is Maryanne unsure of what became of her sister—she also has no clue how Paul died. Paul began school at DFC after aging out of Northern Eagle High School in Ear Falls, Ontario. He was behind when he started at DFC—at 17, he was in grade 10—and he bounced between 10 different boarding houses over the course of three years. Maryanne and Paul spoke almost every day. She encouraged him to work hard in school, ignore the racist taunts he faced on the streets, and be true to himself. In 2006, Maryanne moved to Thunder Bay to be near Paul. Paul was sick of being seen as a “goody two-shoes” by his friends, and he’d begun experimenting with drugs and alcohol. Maryanne had had her own struggles with sobriety in the past, and she wanted to be there for Paul.

On November 10, 2006, Shawon Wavy went to Paul’s house for a Friday night poker game. After Jethro Anderson’s death, Shawon left the city—but now, he was back to attend college. Paul and Shawon had grown up together in Mish, and they’d been close companions. That night was the last time they’d see each other. Paul went out that night to see some friends; when he came home later that night, Maryanne was asleep. She came downstairs to see if he was okay and then went back to bed.

Maryanne heard Paul cooking a midnight snack in the kitchen and using the bathroom. Then, she heard a thud. She hurried downstairs—Paul was face down on the floor. She assumed he’d fallen asleep—she tried to wake him up and get him to the bed. She could smell alcohol on him, but he didn’t seem drunk. She couldn’t find a pulse. Maryanne ran upstairs to wake Richer Keesickquayash, another high school student (and one of Maryanne and Paul’s relatives) who was living with them. They called an ambulance together, and Maryanne fetched a pillow to place under Paul’s head.

On November 11, the coroner performed an autopsy. The post-mortem described Paul as well-nourished with no history of physical trauma or health problems, and it said that there were no indications of homicide. No anatomical or toxicological cause of death was found, and the case was closed. Paul’s death was the third at DFC in six years. Alvin Fiddler visited Maryanne’s house to comfort her—but with no answer as to why or how her son died, she could not be consoled.

In 2015, nine years after Paul’s death, experts who testified at the inquest into the deaths of the “seven fallen feathers” stated that Paul’s death was a “complete mystery.” But the testifying authority hadn’t been at the scene of Paul’s death or examined his body—she was going off of coroner’s warrants and pathologist’s reports. Some young people with genetic heart disease or other underlying issues collapse and die suddenly—but after the inquest, Maryanne and her family were tested, and no one was found to carry any such abnormality. Not a single medical professional had any clue as to why Paul had died. And because the pathologist ordered the destruction of evidence from Paul’s autopsy, there’s nothing that can be pulled out and re-examined. Maryanne has to live with the fact that there are no answers to why her son Paul, or her sister Sarah, were taken from her.