What happened to Charnelle?
A year after a 26-year-old indigenous woman went missing, her family questions the theories about how she died
MISHKEEGOGAMANG FIRST NATION— Charnelle Masakeyash’s bones were found lying on top of a smooth section of Canadian Shield rock that juts out of the forest floor.
Her ribs were found in a small, nearly circular clearing of trees, just off a wellused path that leads from one part of the reserve to the other.
Her shoes were in the circle, neatly sitting side by side. Two of her sweaters were hanging on tree branches. Charnelle’s skull was located just outside the circle, sitting on the damp earth, underneath the trees. Mishkeegogamang elders noticed an absence of blood or ani- mal tracks where her bones lay, finally discovered this past June, after the last of the winter snow melted. Her two sweaters were not ripped or shredded.
The well-travelled forest pathway lies close to the homes of the Masakeyash family. For six months, Mishkeegogamang members organized massive searches for Charnelle. Her family says they last saw her in October. But there is a report, which the family questions, that the 26-year-old was last seen walking on Hwy. 599, just south of Pickle Lake, on Nov. 6, 2015.
The searchers fanned out by the dozens, painstakingly sifting through brush and snow and climbing through the forest, looking for Charnelle. They went out daily, on weekends and whenever the weather permitted. The Ontario Provincial Police searched the area by helicopter. They used divers and tracking dogs. The 3rd Canadian Ranger Patrol Group and staff from the Ministry of Natural Resources joined the search parties.
Every day they came up empty.
Then, in June, a jawbone was discovered inside a doghouse, near one of the Masakeyash family homes.
The police have not determined that Charnelle was murdered. The condition of her bones is making it difficult to determine the cause of death and the Ontario coroner’s office is investigating.
Wild animals may have killed Charnelle, the family has been told. OPP Sgt. Shelley Garr would not comment on the investigation, other than to say it is active and ongoing.
But Mishkeegogamang Chief Connie Gray-McKay and Charnelle’s aunt, Adrianne Masakeyash, don’t believe for a second that the young mother was savagely killed by animals.
“No, an animal didn’t do this,” GrayMcKay says, sighing.
Somebody knows something, she says. “Everything happens fast when there is violence or anger. Anything can happen.” Gray-McKay knows more than 100 people have been interviewed by the police, but she fears no one wanted to speak out because of historical issues of mistrust.
“There is a reluctance to get involved. They don’t want to be in trouble. They don’t want to cause any problems. That is the sad part of this entire tragedy.”
Mishkeegogamang is an Ojibway community near the end of Hwy. 599, an old logging and mining road that has been described as one of the “loneliest” highways in Ontario. The drive is a solid three hours north of Ignace, which is nearly three hours northwest of Thunder Bay.
Mish is one of the few far north Ontario reserves that are accessible all year thanks to the highway, which is more of a double-lane road. It has no shoulders, cell service or gas stations, but you can spot the occasional bald eagle.
The Albany River begins here at Lake St. Joseph. It winds its way northeast, past Marten Falls First Nation and the resource-rich area known as the Ring of Fire, until it finds James Bay.
It is not easy living in Mishkeegogamang.
The federal Ministry of Indigenous Affairs says the cost of living on the reserve is about 60-per-cent higher than in the south. Fresh food is hard to come by, especially in the winter. Most of those living here are un- employed and don’t have access to clean water. The community has often made news down south for its devastating house fires. A volunteer fire service staffs the reserve. There is a fire truck but the garage isn’t heated, so if any water is left in the truck, it can freeze.
That was the case on Feb. 13, 2014, when firefighters tried to use water to douse a house fire. They watched helplessly as Joyce Wassaykeesic, 30, her daughters Serenity, 6, and KiraLyn, 3, and her nephew Nathan Wassaykeesic, 21, all burned to death.
Chronic overcrowding in houses with makeshift heating systems is partly to blame for the fires. But Gray-McKay says they are working hard to bring proper housing to Mish.
Recently, 10 new prefabricated homes were trucked into the reserve and another 10 have been approved by Indigenous Affairs, she says.
The intergenerational trauma of residential schools — 150,000 indigenous children were taken away from their families and sent to 140 federally funded, church-run schools across Canada for nearly 130 years — looms large in Mish. Many here are either residential school survivors or the children of survivors.
Cramped living conditions, grief, joblessness and poverty all combine to create a cycle of addictions and violence. After the February fire, the community was devastated and, in the following months, 60 airlifts out of Mish were scheduled for people in need of substance and addiction treatment. Mishkeegogamang has experienced a staggering amount of pain. In the past several decades, nine women from the community have been added to Canada’s list of at least 1, 181 murdered or missing indig- enous women and girls.
Gone are Sarah Skunk, Viola Panacheese, Rena Fox, Lena Lawson, Evelyn and Sophie Wassaykeesic, Jemima Mulholland, Mariah Wesley and Charnelle.
Adrianne Masakeyash, 41, has always been the motherly type.
At the age of 12, she found herself taking care of her younger siblings because her parents were often passed out drunk on the couch.
When her sister Sylvia died of liver failure after a lifetime of alcohol abuse, Adrianne, a mother of five and a grandmother, took in her sister’s children and has embraced them as her own.
Charnelle was Sylvia’s daughter. She came with three of her kids to live with Masakeyash. Charnelle’s fourth child, her youngest, was taken into provincial care because of high special needs. The father of Charnelle’s kids, James Junior Fox, burned to death in one of the house fires that swept the reserve in 2014.
Masakeyash is lucky to have one of the new prefabricated homes, but the furnace doesn’t work properly — it blows in cold air once the furnace stops running. She says the house is buckling because it wasn’t placed on proper footings.
Thirteen of her children and extended family live with her. “I don’t know how we’ll survive the winter,” she says. “We have one family living in each room.”
Masakeyash believes Charnelle went missing long before she was apparently spotted on Nov. 6, 2015, walking down the road. She believes that sighting was a mistake. When Charnelle was in Pickle Lake last fall and her children were at home in Mishkeegogamang, she would call about four times a week. Suddenly in October, the phone calls stopped.
“By Halloween we hadn’t seen her,” Masakeyash says.
Charnelle was private and mostly kept her thoughts to herself, Masakeyash recalls. But she liked to go out and spend time with people her own age. And, like her mother, she liked to drink.
Since Charnelle’s disappearance last fall, there have been rumours about what happened to her. One is that she was seen drinking with friends near the Masakeyash houses and that she was left to her own devices, struggling and alone. Those friends have never come forward.
Masakeyash does not believe someone on the reserve knows what happened to Charnelle. “If I know my family or the other natives as well as I think I do, they would have broken right down by now and they would have told someone. If it was an accident, they couldn’t have kept it secret,” she says.
A psychic told Masakeyash that Charnelle was killed off the reserve and her body was brought to Mishkeegogamang. This rings truer to Masakeyash.
And a medicine man told the family that she was off the reserve and near one of the five mines surrounding Mishkeegogamang. This theory moved Masakeyash’s sister so much that in the winter, she would snowshoe out to the mine, build a fire, sit and wait for Charnelle to appear.
Yet another theory gnaws at Masakeyash.
Charnelle was sexually assaulted in Pickle Lake three years ago. She had been out with a girlfriend and they were offered all-terrain-vehicle rides through the forest. Her friend went and came back without incident, Masakeyash says. Then it was Charnelle’s turn. As soon as she came back from the ride, she went straight to the health centre and got a rape kit, Masakeyash says.
After the assault, Charnelle was afraid, Masakeyash says. She was always looking out the window, fearful. She pressed charges and the case went to trial in Kenora, but the man was let go.
“She said she had to get away from this guy,” says her aunt. “I tried to keep her at home here but she never wanted to settle down. She wanted to be out with people her own age.”
Masakeyash says she cannot recall being questioned by the police. “The police would only come out and tell us what they were doing (with the search). They never questioned me as to what had happened. But most of the time I couldn’t talk when they were here. I was very emotional,” she says.
Now, since the discovery of Charnelle’s remains in June, Masakeyash wants some answers as to what has happened with the investigation.
“Wild animals did not do this,” she says. “Whoever did needs to be brought to justice.”