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.
Themes
The Intimate and Impersonal Dimensions of Colonialism
Margaret-Olemaun’s story reminds readers that as Indigenous people endured the violence and injustice of the system of colonialism, they experienced its various elements on a daily basis and in individual circumstances. Margaret-Olemaun’s experience at residential school is emblematic of many similar stories, but it is also unique. Children at schools witnessed elements of the colonial structure without being experts about its history, methods, or implications—that type of analysis happens after the fact and with anti-colonial education. While at school, children had only their own experiences and the stories they heard in their own social circles to formulate a critique of the institutions. Their impressions, therefore, came from the treatment they received by colonial officials and school staff.
The Introduction briefly mentions Canada’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission, which exposed the trauma of the residential school system as a critical piece of the cultural genocide that colonizers launched in North America. The Commission interviewed thousands of residential school students, collecting stories like Margaret-Olemaun’s and deciphering patterns of mental, emotional, and physical abuse the system created. The wide collection of personal accounts, however, also reveals that the history is complicated (as most history is). Not every student had a universally negative experience at school among new peer groups and with teachers/mentors. Even though the system was, on the whole, destructive to Indigenous communities and individuals, historical actors shaped its contours on the ground level with nuance. We see these dynamics in Margaret-Olemaun’s case: She appreciates Sister MacQuillan and despises the Raven, though the two occupy similar positions within the schooling system. The contrast between the two nuns reveals the extent to which individual historical actors differed even within shared worldviews.
Understanding colonialism simply as an adversarial clash between colonizer and colonized oversimplifies and misrepresents lived experiences. Though Margaret-Olemaun and her community recognize the group of European Christians in their homelands as “outsiders,” Indigenous individuals formed alliances, partnerships, and families with colonizers and descendants of colonizers. This point is not to suggest that colonialism is good or beneficial. The variation in individual circumstances merely reflects the agency that individuals maintain over their selves and circumstances despite the oppression they might face. Margaret-Olemaun exercises this agency when she takes control of the stockings situation at school. More positively, she achieves her goal of learning how to read and cherishes her favorite book, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland.
The Strength and Endurance of Indigenous Cultures
In highlighting the violence and destruction that colonizers brought to Indigenous homelands, many historical commentators have produced a declension narrative in which colonizers’ culture eradicates and replaces Indigenous cultures. While colonialism and its legacies bring devastation, the policies aimed at eradicating Indigenous cultures in Canada failed. Indigenous people and traditions survived despite the trauma and punishment that came with exercising those traditions.
The main character’s name illustrates these dynamics. She is Margaret-Olemaun, a girl who both grew up in an Indigenous community and values its traditions and attended a Catholic residential school and received a Western education there. The two identities are not mutually exclusive, nor did one replace the other. The intersecting components of her identity do create challenges, however. Jordan-Fenton addresses the fact that many elders forgot or refused to speak their Indigenous languages after attending school, where instructors often forced them to speak exclusively in English and to denounce any Indigenous practices in favor or European ones (88-90). Even Indigenous home communities might regard returning students as outsiders because of their altered skillsets and changes in habits, abilities, and goals. More recently, communities have done a lot of healing work to navigate these historical traumas and revitalize languages, cultures, and pride.
Margaret-Olemaun attributes her own strength to her culture at several moments in the book. As her desire to stand up to the Raven increases, she says, “I had something to teach her about the spirit of us Inuvialuit” (49). This statement foreshadows the triumph that Margaret-Olemaun eventually has over the Raven. She also says at the end of the book, “We Inuvialuit are headstrong. Thankfully, we are also resilient” (84). Recognizing strength and resiliency in herself and in her culture allowed Margaret-Olemaun to maintain her Indigenous identity and strength of conviction as she faced the abuse of the residential schooling system. Jordan-Fenton explains that this type of communal and historical strength passes through generations of Inuvialuit families (85).
The Importance of Self-Esteem for Children
The book focuses specifically on Indigenous children attending the Catholic residential school in Aklavik, but in the Preface, Christy Jordan-Fenton writes, “For all of our readers, especially the very young ones, we would both like you to know, no matter what you are going through, no matter how hopeless it seems, […] you are the hero of your own story” (xvii). Margaret-Olemaun’s story reveals the importance of confidence and self-esteem in her self-preservation at school. Maintaining her sense of self was all the more difficult because the school’s main goal was to replace that self with a new one that rejected old customs, beliefs, and practices in favor of new ones. Margaret-Olemaun triumphs in her story because she refuses to give up her Inuvialuit identity and instead harnesses the spirit that resides within it.
The writing style highlights the centrality of children in their own stories. The narrator offers the names of very few adults. We know the Swan’s name is Sister MacQuillan, but we do not learn the names of Margaret-Olemaun’s parents or the Raven. Her parents are positive characters who love and support their daughter; the Raven is a brutal disciplinarian who humiliates and punishes her student. The omission of names, therefore, is not a commentary on a particular character’s worth. It merely reflects Margaret-Olemaun’s relationship to them. Margaret-Olemaun calls her parents the familiar names “Mother” and “Father.” She meets and admires Sister MacQuillan, who is an acquaintance worthy of naming in the book. The Raven is only a villain, and the reference to her by use of only the animal name highlights the inhumanity of her treatment towards Margaret-Olemaun.
The Raven is not the only bully at the school, however. At several points in the book, other students, particularly a girl named Katherine and her clique, laugh at Margaret-Olemaun when the Raven publicly humiliates her or when they see her struggle. The pressure from her peer group mounts when the Raven makes Margaret-Olemaun more of an outcast by forcing her to wear the bright red stockings. Katherine teases not only Margaret-Olemaun but her best friend, Agnes, for associating herself with “Fatty Legs.” The narrator says, “Katherine teased Agnes so mercilessly that one day, for the very first time, Agnes did not pick me first to be on her team at recreation time” (69).
With her social world crumbling, however, she says, “My resolve hardened. I could not lose my best friend” (69). Margaret-Olemaun carries out her plan to destroy the red stockings to take back control of her own life and defy the people who torment her and make her feel ashamed of herself. The act earns her not only more equal treatment to her peers and a sense of satisfaction, but also respect from Sister MacQuillan. When the two say goodbye, the nun tells her, “You are a strong child. You will go far in life” (76). The woman’s approval was not the driver of Margaret-Olemaun’s actions, but it reinforces for her that her willfulness—something for which the Raven punished her—is a positive attribute of her personality.
Even though Margaret-Olemaun technically breaks school rules to triumph over the Raven (and, by extension, over the system she represents), the reader recognizes the rules, system, and daily treatment of the pupils at the school as unjust. Margaret-Olemaun’s actions alleviated harm that the Raven was perpetuating; they did not cause harm to anyone else.
