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.
Chapters 3-5Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 3 Summary
Olemaun’s introduction to life at the school is humiliating and traumatizing. She is first ushered into smelly bathroom stalls and has her hair cut short along with several other new pupils. The only girl in the line-up who didn’t have her hair cut “was likely a German trapper’s daughter (31), or, in other words, not an Indigenous person of color. She gets new clothes—blouses, overall dresses, and “scratchy canvas bloomers” (32)—that she calls “impractical” compared to the warm furs she arrived in.
Olemaun meets her classmates, many whom she cannot speak with because of language barriers between different Indigenous nations. Some classmates are bullies to her, especially the Gwich’in girls, who come from west of the Inuvialuit and who historically “do not get along with [Olemaun’s] people” (32).
It is quickly apparent that a particular “beaked” (also called “hooked-nose”) nun is another instant enemy. The nun, whom Olemaun starts referring to as “the Raven,” christens her “Margaret” on the spot and tells her to use Christian names and speak English. She then starts instructing the group on “proper” hygiene. Olemaun reflects, “I didn’t need a lesson on how to wash my face. I already knew how to do that. What I needed was to learn how to read” (36). Though Olemaun’s mother has sent her with supplies, the family’s unfamiliarity with conventional Western toiletry products leads Olemaun to attempt to use shaving cream as toothpaste. Her classmates laugh at her discomfort.
A tall nun enters the room and instantly shows Olemaun kindness. This is Sister MacQuillan, or “the Swan.” When this woman is not around, however, the Raven bullies Olemaun and fiercely directs the students to clean the premises. This pattern lasts all summer. Olemaun recognizes two silver linings in her circumstances. The first is that she finds her friend from home, Agnes, and the two girls are able to remain in close proximity, Agnes providing information and guidance. The other is that she will eventually learn how to read, which remains her goal despite her horrific introduction to the school.
Chapter 4 Summary
The school year finally starts, but Margaret-Olemaun is devastated to learn that the Raven, not the kind Sister MacQuillan, will be her teacher. The Raven’s cruelty and bullying towards Margaret-Olemaun extend into the classroom. She puts Margaret-Olemaun on the spot to read before she has even started to learn English letters or words. Margaret-Olemaun wonders, “How did the Raven expect us to learn without speaking to us in our language, so we could understand?” (46). The Raven often makes Margaret-Olemaun do extra cleaning and chores, to carry out her vision of proper discipline and education. Margaret-Olemaun’s fighting spirit keeps her going. She says, “I had something to teach her about the spirit of us Inuvialuit” (49).
One of Margaret-Olemaun’s first acts of open defiance is refusing to eat the “mush” in the cafeteria. She says that her “father’s sled dogs would not have licked the bowl it was put in” (49). The Raven physically confronts her, tossing her a rag to clean and then grabbing her dress and exclaiming, “This is no place for a willful child” (50). In the struggle, Margaret-Olemaun knocks her mush onto the Raven’s front. The Raven makes to strike the girl, but Sister MacQuillan intervenes by stepping between them. The chapter ends with the Raven’s threat that she’ll deliver “a little more education” (51). Margaret-Olemaun knows that she is “in for trouble” (51).
Chapter 5 Summary
Margaret-Olemaun learns how to read during her first year at school. With that major goal accomplished, she plans to leave and never return. An early freeze in the ocean, however, prevents water travel from Banks Island, and Margaret-Olemaun learns that she will have to stay for another year. The news comes in a letter from her father. She cries in despair. She starts having dreams about being locked in a cage under the Raven’s robes.
When classes start again, a group of Brothers arrive at the school. Though they, too, are affiliated with the church, Margaret-Olemaun says, “I was pretty sure that some did not even believe in God” (56). They are cruel to the students even as smallpox breaks out and spreads through the facility. On one occasion, Margaret-Olemaun works with a full bladder and has to sneak out from under the Raven’s gaze to find a bathroom. A Brother jumps out to scare her “bearing fishy, yellow teeth” and growling (58). The man runs away, laughing, as Margaret-Olemaun urinates in her clothes. The Raven makes her publicly clean her clothes as a humiliating punishment.
The nuns dictate a letter that they instruct the students to write and send to their parents. The nuns want them to complement the school and say that the staff treats them well. Margaret-Olemaun instead writes a note about how terrible the food is and how mean the nuns are, and in which she begs her parents to pick her up as soon as possible. The Raven collects the notes and checks them. She demands that Margaret-Olemaun write the note she dictated, but Margaret-Olemaun thinks, “Nothing could make me write that I loved the school” (62). The Swan enters the room and excuses Margaret-Olemaun before she has to write the letter. Margaret-Olemaun instead hopes to deliver her message to her parents on a radio broadcast that the nuns have arranged. They give the students similarly positive (and false) scripts to read out. Margaret-Olemaun stays silent during her turn, hoping that “silence would surely tell them that something was wrong” (64).
Chapters 3-5 Analysis
Tension mounts between Margaret-Olemaun and various adversaries throughout this section. The cruel nun she calls “the Raven” is the worst and most constant enemy, but other members of the school’s staff and pupils from rival nations also belittle, frighten, and humiliate Margaret-Olemaun at school.
Her run-ins with Gwich’in girls highlight the diversity of Indigenous nations—even neighboring nations—in the region. While Western popular culture often flattens Indigenous cultures into central stock characters and imagery, there is no single Indigenous (or “Native,” or “Aboriginal,” or even “Indigenous High Arctic”) way of life and culture. The students at residential schools confronted not only outsiders from foreign continents and religions, but other Indigenous students with different beliefs as well.
The contrast between the Raven and the Swan (Sister MacQuillan) becomes apparent right away in this section and persists and grows throughout the rest of the book. On some occasions, the Swan directly saves Margaret-Olemaun from the Raven’s cruelty. The two sisters represent competing visions of colonialism. Myths about Indigenous savagery led some colonizers to disregard Indigenous humanity and thus to favor physically violent eradication of Indigenous cultures and support cruelty and violence to Indigenous bodies. Other colonizers perceived colonization as a benevolent process meant to uplift Indigenous communities from inferiority to equality. In truth, both of these outlooks were problematic in the way that they assumed Western (and White) superiority and Indigenous inferiority, though the second model left room for exchanges of compassion and kindness, which were in short supply in the residential schools.
Margaret-Olemaun reflects on some of the systemic injustices associated with the school and the school system. For example, she calls the residential school system a “money-making business” and acknowledges that the government paid the schools more when more pupils attended. This structure encouraged the school staff to keep the students at school and not to let them return to their families even for the summers.
One of the things that helps Margaret-Olemaun cope with the difficulty of school is reading Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. It steadily becomes an analogy in the text: A girl plummets into an unfamiliar world, encounters some kind and some cruel inhabitants of that world, and eventually makes it home. It was that very book that ignited her interest in reading before she attended school, and it remains a source of comfort and escapism once she is there.
Bird imagery provides the central metaphors in the text. The two main nuns in the story are described in terms of birds—the tall, elegant, and kind Sister MacQuillan being a swan, and the mean, bullying “beaked” nun being the Raven. Margaret-Olemaun refers to the schools as “nests,” though not to create an image of home and belonging. Nests in this sense are like traps where the young birds (the students) cannot fly away towards their own freedom.
Even as she remains trapped at school, Margaret-Olemaun’s resolve and resilience become apparent. She openly defies her oppressors even when there are consequences. She calls these qualities her “spirit,” and they become more and more important throughout the rest of the book.
