Fatty Legs: A True Story

A country-wide system of residential schools collected Indigenous students from all across Canada with the intention of teaching the children in Western educational traditions in subjects like English, arithmetic, and various gendered vocational skills deemed appropriate by colonial authorities. The purpose of this education was to replace traditional tribal identities and practices—to assimilate students from Indigenous cultures to European culture and shape them into “productive” and obedient members of colonial society. Students performed unpaid labor that benefitted the schools and affiliated institutions like hospitals.

The government controlled these schools and incentivized enrollment through propaganda, policy, and force, but teachers were often religious professionals like nuns and missionaries. Government officials even kidnapped children and brought them to far-away schools. Children lived at these schools, sometimes year-round. School staff cut students’ hair and forbade them to speak English. Students received Christian names and new clothes made from European fabrics like wool instead of furs from regional animals. From 2008 to 2015, a special Canadian task force called the Truth and Reconciliation Commission conducted interviews with thousands of former residential school students to understand the system of abuses that students experienced in schools and to educate Canadians about the destructive colonialism in Canadian history. The United States carried out a similar system with schools often referred to as “boarding schools.” Margaret-Olemaun attended the school in Aklavik in the 1940s, but students attended schools all throughout the late 19th and 20th centuries.

Margaret-Olemaun and her family are Inuvialuit people from the Arctic region of Canada. Their ancestral homelands are in present-day Northwestern Canada and extend to several islands in the Arctic Ocean, like Banks Island, where Margaret-Olemaun’s family had a home. They also followed nomadic migration routes throughout the broader region. Their Indigenous language is called Inuvialuktun. The Inuvialuit neighbor other Indigenous nations that together constitute Inuit peoples. The term Inuit is a more appropriate term than the outdated term Eskimo. The historical rivals of the Inuvialuit are the Gwich’in. Margaret-Olemaun reveals this historical tension to the reader when she meets Katherine, a Gwich’in girl, at school. Margaret-Olemaun also alludes to aspects of Inuvialuit culture, like traditional foods (including whale blubber, seal, and other meats), water travel, dog sled travel, and hunting.