74 pages • 2 hours read
Margaret Pokiak-FentonFatty Legs: A True Story
Nonfiction | Autobiography / Memoir | Middle Grade | Published in 2010A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more. For select classroom titles, we also provide Teaching Guides with discussion and quiz questions to prompt student engagement.
Chapter 6-EpilogueChapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 6 Summary
Chapter 6 is the story of the red stockings that inspired the nickname “Fatty Legs,” for which the book is named. The Raven’s cruelty intensifies after the incident at the radio station. Margaret-Olemaun returns from extra chores to a dormitory full of celebration. The girls are excited about their new stockings. Agnes informs Margaret-Olemaun that everyone will get a new pair. The Raven gives her a bright red pair, unlike all of the other girls’ dark pairs. Margaret-Olemaun thinks of this as “a heartless trick” (66). In her own estimation, the red stockings made her look “like a plump-legged circus clown” (67), and the other girls and the Raven laugh at her. She compares the Raven to the evil Queen of Hearts in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland.
When the leader of the Gwich’in girls, Katherine, calls Margaret-Olemaun “Fatty Legs,” she retaliates by calling her “Fatty Face.” The Raven punishes only Margaret-Olemaun, making her do the laundry. As she sees her tears “poof” into steam on the cast iron vats in the laundry room, she gets an idea of “how [to] stop all of this Fatty Legs business” (69).
The torment from the other girls at school gets worse for a few days, but then Margaret-Olemaun seizes her chance to destroy the stockings. She sticks them into the fire below the laundry cauldrons while no one is looking. This is her big triumph: “I smiled with satisfaction. I would not be bested” (70).
The Raven is furious about her bare legs and has the students search for the stockings. Katherine bullies her, but Margaret-Olemaun stands her ground. Finally, Sister MacQuillan enters the dormitory and instructs her to pick out a new pair of wool stockings from the storeroom. Margaret-Olemaun selects a “beautiful thick pair of gray wool stockings” that she loves and feels confident in (73). The Raven is furious about the new stockings, but Sister MacQuillan talks to her before she can punish Margaret-Olemaun. As the Raven seems to “[blow] up like a […] balloon” (74), the Swan smiles at Margaret-Olemaun, and the main character finally feels more protected and valued at school.
Chapter 7 Summary
The new stockings do not solve all of Margaret-Olemaun’s problems at school. She has recurring nightmares about being trapped in the Raven’s cage and worries that her family will never retrieve her. A letter from her father arrives that instructs Margaret-Olemaun to take the school’s boat to Tuktoyaktuk during the summer, where her family will pick her up. Margaret-Olemaun visits the Swan to thank her for her kindness. The Sister compliments her, telling her she “will go far in life” (76), gives her her own copy of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, and calls her “Olemaun” instead of “Margaret.” She responds by calling the nun “Qugyuk,” the word for “Swan” in her Indigenous language. The Sister imitates a swan, and they laugh in their final moment together.
Several students take a boat called the Immaculata to Tuktoyaktuk. She is thrilled to be “out on the open water, where I belonged” (79). It takes a moment for Margaret-Olemaun’s mother to recognize her, but her father immediately takes her into his arms. The whole family hugs, and her mother offers her some of her favorite food, but Margaret-Olemaun initially does not want it, no longer accustomed to its taste. This reaction upsets her mother, who cries that her daughter has become an outsider. Her father assures them all that Margaret-Olemaun “was still Inuvialuit” (81), and she settles in happily with her family. At the end of the story, she compares herself to Alice in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland: “My curiosity had led me far away, and now here I was, after two years, satisfied that I now knew what happened to girls who went down rabbit holes” (82).
Epilogue Summary: “After the Story”
A short chapter provides an update in the author’s voice about what happened after her stay at school. In her personal life, she once again felt joy with her family and in traditional activities that sustained her community.
Changing government policies and curiosity led Margaret-Olemaun’s younger siblings to attend the school in Aklavik. She says, “I tried to warn them, just as Rosie had tried to warn me […] It was no use” (84). To protect them from the cruelty she experienced and the danger of losing their Inuvialuit pride and spirit, Margaret-Olemaun returns with them. She says that she wanted to be there to remind them “that wrens can be just as clever as ravens and owls” (84). In the metaphor, the Inuvialuit children are the small, gentle songbirds. The raven, of course, is the cruel nun and other nasty nuns like her. The owls are the Brothers, who lurk around in the shadows and intimidate the children (Margaret-Olemaun previously made this comparison on page 58).
Chapter 6-Epilogue Analysis
Margaret-Olemaun triumphs in the final section of the book. Though she endures a final wave of suffering at school, she bests the Raven with her bravery and initiative to act on her own behalf. Her biggest triumph of all is leaving the school and returning home with her family, where she can be her authentic self and not live in shame and fear.
We see the difficulty associated with adjusting to her home culture, though. When she meets her family in Tuktoyaktuk, she finds her old favorite foods “greasy and […] salty, with a strong smell” (81). The drastic change in food preferences scares Margaret-Olemaun’s mother into thinking that her daughter is irreversibly transformed into an outsider, though Margaret-Olemaun’s father, who attended the residential school himself in his youth, knows that she will readjust to her Indigenous culture even though she has learned different skills and developed different preferences at school. He is right: Margaret-Olemaun reads to her family like she always wished she could and then happily goes to sleep under furs in a room with her family. The residential school did not rid Margaret-Olemaun of her Indigenous identity like it had aimed to. Her return to hunting with her father, fishing with her mother, and playing with her siblings made “the year following my return home […] one of the happiest of my life” (83).
The final scene with Sister MacQuillan also reveals that the nun herself was willing to undermine the colonial system by calling Margaret-Olemaun by her Inuvialuit name instead of by her English, Catholic name. Thus, the greatest kindness Margaret-Olemaun received at school came from someone who did not strictly adhere to its policies and mission. The incident with the red stockings and the nickname “Fatty Legs” was a particularly formative struggle for the author, which we know because the book is named for it and the narrative starts with mention of it. We get the whole story in a single chapter, but because the early part of the book detailed the regular routine and patterns of abuse at school, we can recognize the anecdote’s larger significance. As was typical, the Raven got away with her cruelty and had the last laugh over Margaret-Olemaun. When Margaret-Olemaun burns the stockings and the Raven can’t find them, Margaret-Olemaun reclaims her power and finally gets what she wants (which, in the immediate context of this case, is simply new dark stockings like the other girls have). Though Sister MacQuillan facilitates the acquisition of the preferred stockings, destroying the old ones destroyed the Raven’s power to humiliate Margaret-Olemaun. There is therefore both a material and a spiritual reward for her actions.
The story ends with the final image in the extended metaphor of birds. Every main player in the story is associated with a bird. The children are gentle, tiny wrens. The mean nun and the Brothers are bullying ravens and owls. The commanding and elegant Sister MacQuillan is a swan. Many Indigenous stories throughout the continent feature animals as the main characters. The association of her acquaintances with birds may have stemmed from this storytelling tradition.
