Fatty Legs: A True Story

“‘It isn’t just your hair, Olemaun. They take everything,’ she said, slipping her feet inside her kamik.” 

Olemaun’s older half-sister, Rosie, tries to convince Olemaun not to go to school. While Olemaun is enthusiastic about learning how to read, Rosie tells her that school entails much more than the books. Right away, the school staff cuts the students’ hair, which is both humiliating and traumatic for them. Olemaun knows she might lose her hair but does not think it is a big deal. That is when Rosie tells her that “they take everything.” The statement itself is vague. By “everything,” she means not only material things but also spiritual and identifying aspects of one’s self. We later see that the school aims to completely change students’ senses of self and trajectories in life. The schools try to make them no longer Indigenous.

“I had already learned a lot about hunting, trapping, and curing foods. My friend Agnes, who was 10, had already gone to the school. She told me that the nuns made you sew all of the time. It would not be difficult to learn to sew parkas and kamik if I was used to sewing all of the time. And how could I ever forget our songs and our dances? They were a part of me.” 

Olemaun spins what she hears about school into positives in her own mind. By her logic, improving at sewing would aid her chores in her home community and with her family—like making kamik (Inuit boots) and parkas (fur overcoats). She also cannot imagine anything driving a wedge between her and her cultural traditions. She does not yet understand that the school deliberately tries to obliterate connections to Indigenous cultures and communities in every area of the students’ lives. We know from some of Jordan-Fenton’s notes that many students did forget languages and turn away from Indigenous traditions after spending enough time at residential schools.

“In front of me, at least a dozen children dressed in uniforms crouched in a silty garden, breaking the earth and pulling at roots with small tools. These had to be the naughty children who were made to kneel for forgiveness.” 

Olemaun catches a glimpse of the school buildings before her parents drop her off to stay. The first students she sees are working outside, doing chores. Olemaun assumes that the chores are punishments for being naughty, and she believes that she will be able to avoid that fate by behaving well. She soon learns that punishment is arbitrary at the school, and she will be punished even more than other children even when she behaves.

“‘They would rather be with their families than read,’ my mother said, tightening her lips. Her words stung.”

Before Olemaun’s parents drop her off at school, they see other children crying. Olemaun’s mother says that the children do not want to leave their families and go to school like Olemaun does. This comment makes Olemaun feel guilty. This brief exchange captures some of the complicated family dynamics surrounding residential schools. Parents and children might not agree about the worth of the experience. The “Notes” sections that complement Margaret-Olemaun’s narrative explain how schools changed relationships between members of Indigenous communities or families who attended schools and those who did not.

“An outsider with a hooked nose like a beak came for me, her scraping footsteps echoing through the long, otherwise silent halls. ‘I am glad you have come to your senses,’ she told my father in Inuvialuktun. ‘You certainly can’t teach her the things she needs to know.’”

This is the first scene in which the Raven appears. She chastises Olemaun’s father for not bringing her to school sooner and suggests that he cannot teach her anything valuable. We know that Olemaun’s father takes her hunting and that she possesses advanced skills that are critical to survival in the extreme conditions in the Arctic, but residential schools denounced traditional Indigenous upbringings in favor of Western education and European ways of life, government, society, and economy. The nun does not offer any kind words of welcome.

“‘I can fix my own hair,’ I protested in Inuvialuktun, but she held tight and, with the same motion a bird makes to pull a piece of flesh from a fish, clamped the jaws of the shears down on my braid and severed it. I was horrified. I wasn’t a baby. My other braid fell to the floor to meet the first, and I joined the others in their weeping.” 

Olemaun hoped to be able to avoid having her hair cut at school because she was old enough to maintain her braids herself. She did not have a choice, though; they cut her hair anyway. Olemaun also previously dismissed the prospect of trauma over losing hair, but it is a traumatic episode. The language in the quotation captures the violence of the act in the analogy to a bird ripping apart a fish. Many students at residential schools remembered the trauma of their initial haircut through the rest of their lives.

“I looked for Agnes among them, as they scurried between us passing out the impractical clothes that we were to wear. They had us exchange our warm, comfortable kamik and moccasins for outsider-shoes, and issued each of us a short-sleeved blouse and two pinafores, one navy blue and one khaki. But the worst were the scratchy canvas bloomers. They expected us to wear underwear made out of the same stuff that tents were made with. They knew nothing of living in the North, nor how to dress for it.” 

The clothing exemplifies the cultural disconnect between the colonizers and the Indigenous communities in the Arctic. Olemaun judges her new, European clothing based on practicality and comfort. Her own Inuvialuit clothes are warm, durable, and comfortable. The ones she receives at school are scratchy and do not provide enough warmth for the climate. Her own people know much more about how to live in the Arctic than Europeans who refused to alter their lifestyles to adjust for the harsh conditions (like, for example, using animal furs instead of spun wool). 

“She could say what she wanted—I knew what my grandfather had named me. It was Olemaun, the same as his Alaskan-Yup’ik mother, and it meant the hard stone that is used to sharpen an ulu.”

The Nun renames Olemaun “Margaret” and tells her to use her Christian name and speak English. Olemaun does not yet speak English and vows to keep identifying with her birth name, which came from her family and connects her to her culture. She eventually goes by both “Olemaun” and “Margaret,” but she never gives up her Inuvialuit identity.

“My mother had bought that tube for me. They were not just laughing at me. They were laughing at her.” 

At the Hudson’s Bay Company trading post, Olemaun’s mother accidentally purchased shaving cream instead of toothpaste, given her unfamiliarity with European products. When Olemaun uses the shaving cream as toothpaste and gags, the Gwich’in girls laugh, egged on by the Raven. Olemaun feels the humiliation herself but recognizes that the humiliation extends beyond herself. Instead of compassion and understanding, she faces teasing and bullying that target her family.

“My stomach ached with hunger and my mind ached for knowledge. I could not wait to go to Sister MacQuillan’s class and begin reading.” 

Olemaun’s introduction to school is completely different than she anticipated or hoped, and matters only get worse from there. The school serves meatless, bland food that is different from what she is used to at home. She desperately wants to start learning how to read, but she later learns that she will have to wait until the fall. Even when she does start class, it is with the Raven, not Sister MacQuillan. Because we know how much Olemaun wanted to learn how to read and how much she likes Sister MacQuillan (especially compared to the Raven), we can better understand how devastating Olemaun’s actual circumstances are when she has to work instead of learn and start classes with the Raven.

“The Raven thought she knew a lot, but she cared more about making us do chores than about teaching us. She said that chores were part of our education. For some reason, she seemed to think that I needed more of an education than the others, and as the weeks went by, I was forever mopping the floors, tidying that recreation room, and emptying the honey buckets.” 

Residential schools united labor, education, and discipline in ways that blurred the lines between each. Their approaches aimed to holistically convert Indigenous children into Christian English speakers and punish lingering connections to their home communities and cultures. Chores benefitted the schools and their associated industries. Margaret-Olemaun recognizes that she has been singled out for this warped sense of education and desires to stand up against it.

“Not only did I enjoy proving my teacher wrong, but I figured I had to learn as much as I could that year, because I planned to leave on the North Star with my parents the next summer and never return.” 

Margaret-Olemaun maintains her personal goals while faced with cruelty. She still believes she can capitalize on the opportunity to learn how to read and refuse the other teachings of the school that aim to make her despise her familial and cultural traditions. Because we know she plans to leave the school forever, we understand how heartbreaking it is for Margaret-Olemaun when she learns that she must stay another year.

“But the nuns did their very best not to return any of us. Keeping us at the school was an easy way to ensure that we would return each fall, which was important to them. It wasn’t just the chores—they were paid by the government per student, and plucking us from our homes and keeping us in their nests was a money-making business.”

This quotation reveals some of the larger colonial context into which the residential schools fit. Though their main mission was to deliver Western education and indoctrinate Indigenous youth with settler society values, schools aimed to profit as much as possible off of their students. They kept the children for as long as possible to serve as a labor force and keep government money flowing into their establishments. We continue to see the ways in which the schools prioritize colonial values pertaining to economy and societal norms over the lives and well-being of the Indigenous children who attend them.

“I was no stranger to hard work—life in the North required it—but I really disliked working in the hospital.” 

The Catholic school in Aklavik operated a hospital next door, and students had to work in the hospital. Margaret-Olemaun does not like this work, but her complaints do not stem from a desire to avoid work. As she says, she is used to hard work of a different kind. The hospital is a depressing and frightening place. We see in this statement the continual and varying horrors that schools exposed young children to while they were away from home. Margaret-Olemaun was eight years old and doing the work of a nurse. We also learn that the Raven accused her of laziness, which was a stereotype about Indigenous children invented and spread by colonizers who brought different work patterns and priorities with them to the lands they occupied. 

“The Raven had played a heartless trick on me. Embarrassment and anger swelled in my heart. These stockings could never have belonged to a fancy lady from Toronto.” 

The red stockings represent yet another blow for Margaret-Olemaun at school. The moment is all the more upsetting because she anticipated receiving a nice pair of stockings in a dark color like all the other girls. She envisioned fashionable tights that had belonged to a sophisticated, modern women. Instead she receives bright red ones that she finds unflattering and humiliating. The feelings that she recognizes growing within her in the moment she receives the red stockings develop into a resolve to take back control of her life.

“The laughter of the other girls enveloped me. It wrapped a million fingers around me and would not let go.” 

This suffocating imagery communicates the extreme stress and unhappiness that the school experience created. We know that this episode with the stockings came to be by the cruel whim of a single nun. The nun fostered this feeling of humiliation, which is unfit behavior for a teacher of children. Hearing about the pain of this episode helps the reader understand why residential schools were so harmful to children’s psyches and self-esteem. This is perhaps the low point for Margaret-Olemaun. She endures the brutal humiliation for a few days before devising a plan to ditch the stockings forever.

“The time had come to put my plan into action. Each morning as I pulled up my red stockings, my spirit rose. All I needed was opportunity.”

Margaret-Olemaun’s entire outlook changes once she develops a plan to destroy the stockings and challenge the Raven. Her self-esteem grows as she seeks to protect herself and prove her own cleverness and resourcefulness instead of constantly being made to think that she is a bad and inferior child. The plan alone is enough to lift Margaret-Olemaun’s spirit. Its success is even more elating.

“The Raven thought she was there to teach me a few things, but in the end, I think it was she who learned a lesson: Be careful what bids you choose to pluck from their nests. A wren can be just as clever as a raven.” 

This statement is the moral of the story. The adult colonizers made assumptions and abused their power dynamic in relation to Indigenous students, but the students (wrens, in this example) never forfeited their agency. While the whole colonial education system (and colonialism more broadly) sought to eradicate Indigenous cultures and spirit, Indigenous historical actors maintained their cultural identities and resisted. While some acts of rebellion might have been small in the grand scheme of the colonial project, they were significant in the lives of individuals.

“At times, I felt as though my parents might forget me—forget that they had a daughter in a faraway school.” 

We usually hear about humiliation and discontent with excessive chores, but another frequent emotion Margaret-Olemaun has to endure at school is fear. She is afraid of some of the staff and becomes afraid that her time at school has indefinitely separated her from her family. She once believed she could never lose her essential connection to her family and home, but the trauma of the student experience makes her fear the worst. She has nightmares about being trapped at school and longs to return to her family.

“She had called me by my name—the name I had not heard in two years. Hearing it now brought tears to my eyes.” 

Sister MacQuillan says goodbye to Margaret-Olemaun, first calling her “Margaret” and then repeating her statement but correcting her name to “Olemaun.” The staff at residential schools were supposed to enforce colonial culture and steer children away from Indigenous names, beliefs, and practices. Sister MacQuillan acknowledges the legitimacy of Indigenous cultures and uplifts Margaret-Olemaun when she calls her by her birth name. Instead of erasing all the pieces of the students who came to Aklavik, Sister MacQuillan honors some of the essential pieces.

“My mother cried and said I was now an outsider. On the way to our camp, she asked my father to buy me some of their outsider-food from the Hudson’s Bay store in Tuktoyaktuk. He laughed and told her that I was still Inuvialuit, and when I got hungry enough, I would eat. Eventually, I did.” 

Returning home from school could be very difficult for children and their families. Students got used to different foods, schedules, and lifestyles at school and needed to readjust once back home. To family or community members, these altered habits and preferences might look like irreversible changes. Margaret-Olemaun’s father, who attended school and returned to so many aspects of his traditional lifestyle, understands that Margaret-Olemaun has not irrevocably changed and is therefore calmer about the changes. He understands from his personal experience that an Indigenous person can participate in both Western customs and Indigenous ones. 

“However, my three younger sisters grew curious. After they pestered my father non-stop, and the government made school attendance a condition for receiving child benefits, he gave in and agreed that they, too, could go and learn to read. I tried to warn them, just as Rosie had tried to warn me.” 

The fact that Margaret-Olemaun’s younger siblings attend schools reminds us that the colonial system was large and powerful and reached far beyond the confines of one individual’s story. Like their older sister, they could not understand the horror of the schooling experience without living it first-hand. Their sister’s words did not lessen their desires to attend school, so she accompanied them to protect them.

“We owe a massive debt to all the elders and knowledge keepers who carry on their traditional ways, speak their traditional languages, have the courage to bring their love to the world, and are brave enough to share the stories of how they endured the horrors of the Indian Residential/Boarding School systems in Canada and the U.S. From the time they were children, they have been facing down oppression by nations that have systemically sought to kill their culture and silence their voices.” 

Jordan-Fenton acknowledges the ongoing role of colonialism in Indigenous communities and the hard work and bravery required to continually resist its legacies and structures. Margaret-Olemaun became an elder long after her years at the Catholic residential school, and her work in cultural preservation and revitalization benefits younger generations of Inuvialuit children. Jordan-Fenton explains the true stakes of their lifelong resistance efforts: Countries attempted to eradicate Indigenous cultures and erase their presence from modern history.