Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in Seven Fallen Feathers, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Colonialism, Cultural Genocide, and Racism
Generational Trauma and Circular Suffering
Indigenous Youth, Education Reform, and Support Networks
Tradition, Prophecy, Spirituality, and Hope
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.
Talaga’s description of Mish is nearly identical to her description of Pik—both reserves are profoundly lacking in resources and the basic necessities needed to help people not just thrive but even to survive. Talaga uses these descriptions to highlight how colonialism and cultural genocide are ongoing processes that continue to decimate Indigenous communities all across Canada.
Themes
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.
This passage highlights the many traumas that Maryanne faced while she herself was in her formative years. Not only was she forced to go to one of Canada’s residential schools—she was sent far away from home to go to school with children from a completely different culture than hers, illustrating the government’s complete lack of investment in using the residential schools to do anything other than control and assimilate Indigenous children. She watched her sister get violently taken away and slip through the system—to this day, no one knows what happened to Sarah, and so Maryanne is left with no closure, fearing the worst. Maryanne’s trauma, this passage suggests, would inform how she brought up her son Paul—and how Paul himself navigated the world.
Themes
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.
Maryanne moved to Thunder Bay because she sensed that the support networks that were supposed to be looking out for Paul’s well-being weren’t sufficient. Having survived the residential schools herself, Maryanne likely realized that if she didn’t show up for her son, no one would. This illustrates how circular suffering can emerge within Indigenous communities and families. Paul’s own suffering and difficulties while at school in Thunder Bay affected his mother, reactivating the traumas of her past.
Themes
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.
Paul’s death is such a unique tragedy because when he needed help, he reached out for support—and in many ways, he got it. His mother came to Thunder Bay to live with and support him, and he had a network of friends like Shawon who’d experienced loss before and who presumably wanted to look out for him.
Themes
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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.
Paul’s sudden and bizarre death was something that Maryanne wasn’t at all prepared for. Paul hadn’t seemed intoxicated or distressed when he’d come in—she’d had no way of knowing that something was profoundly wrong.
Themes
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.
There was no obvious reason for Paul’s death—and even the coroner couldn’t determine what had caused his sudden passing. But rather than hunt harder for answers, the coroner’s office simply closed the case and left it unresolved. The coroner’s office’s disinterest in Paul’s death echoed the Thunder Bay police’s apathy toward the deaths of Jethro and Curran. And Paul’s unsolved death mirrored, for his mother Maryanne, the lack of closure around her sister’s disappearance. This is a major instance of circular suffering. Even though Paul’s death and Sarah’s disappearance weren’t necessarily related, they both followed a pattern of institutional indifference and served to traumatize, confound, and isolate Maryanne.
Themes
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.
Here, Talaga investigates the profoundly sad lack of interest in solving Paul’s case. The coroner’s office was so quick to close his file and move on that they ordered the destruction of forensic evidence after a certain period of time—so now, years later, even though there’s been renewed interest in figuring out what happened to Paul and why, there’s nothing available that could provide Maryanne with any kind of closure. Maryanne hoped to save her son from suffering the same lack of support and resulting traumas that she and her family did—but instead, the things that happened to Paul served to create circular suffering that re-traumatized Maryanne.
Themes
