Book review

By Shafia u sman

Fatty Legs: A True Story

Fatty Legs is both a children’s book and a memoir of Margaret Pokiak-Fentons’ true experiences at Aklavik’s residential school. When Margaret arrives at the school, Raven – the hooked-nose nun –consistently humiliates the strong-spirited Margaret. Margaret’s real turmoil began when Raven forces Margaret to wear a pair of red stockings, while all the other girls wore gray stockings. Just like that, Margaret’s classmates began to tease her and call her fatty legs.

At the beginning of the book we are introduced to Margaret’s picturesque arctic childhood. In the 1940s, Margaret grew up on Banks Island where her father was a hunter-trapper. At a young age, Margaret traveled along the Mackenzie River with her family to Aklavik. This was where she first saw the dark cloaked nuns and she was aware that they “held the key to the greatest of the outsiders’ mysteries – reading”.

Margaret pleads with her father to send her to school so that she could learn how to read. Margaret’s father warns her that she will risk losing the knowledge of hunting, curing meat, making embroidered parkas and her own songs and dances if she goes to the residential school. But the innocent and feisty Margaret kept pleading with her dad to let her study. When Margaret was eight years old her parents makes the difficult decision to send their daughter to the residential school.

When Margaret arrives at the school she tolerates a lot of hardship; her long braids are cut off, she is scolded for speaking her own language, she suffers from homesickness, and she is assigned to do difficult and unpleasant chores. But she remains determined to learn how to read.

What Margaret cannot tolerate is how Raven consistently taunts and degrades her in front of the other students. Raven’s unrelenting humiliation makes Margaret determined to show Raven “the spirit of us Inuvialuit.” The rest of the book reveals a series of Margaret’s small acts of resistance against the unjust Raven until, finally, one day Margaret crafts a way to liberate herself from the red stockings.

Margaret Pokiak-Fenton co-wrote the book with her daughter-in-law Christy Jordan-Fenton. Their decision to turn Margaret’s story into a children’s book makes Fatty Legs a unique account of the residential school experience. Also, Liz Amini-Holmes, who illustrated Fatty Legs, captures Margaret’s emotional turmoil in her dramatic artwork.

Liz Amini-Holmes’ poignant illustrations will pull at the reader’s heart. Amini-Holmes explained to me that Christy’s “darkly poetic” writing nourished her own artwork. “Thankfully there were so many different emotional beats in the story,” remarked AminiHolmes, “I had room to convey evocative images of Margaret’s fear, loneliness and determination, and could express a more complex and bittersweet experience.”

The writing and the artwork take us from a young girl’s innocent desire to read, through her painful homesickness and ultimately her courage to stand up to her oppressor, with both humor and heartbreak.

When I opened the book I expected a story rife with pain and lament over a childhood lost to residential school. But what I found was a story of Margaret’s triumph. Fatty Legs offers an invaluable lesson for children humiliated by their oppressor or adults who hold onto the grief from a painful past; which is that each of us can find the strength within ourselves to stand up to injustice and restore our sense of dignity and self-worth.∞