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.
Introduction-Chapter 2Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Introduction Summary
The half-page Introduction begins, “My name is Olemaun Pokiak—that’s OO-lee-mawn—but some of my classmates used to call me ‘Fatty Legs’” (1). She explains that the origin of the cruel nickname was due to “a wicked nun” (1), but we get no further details yet. Halfway through the single-paragraph chapter comes a transition: “But I put an end to it” (1). The author then reveals that the book that follows is a decades-old secret about how she managed to do away with the stockings.
Chapter 1 Summary
In this chapter, we learn about the Inuvialuit world of the High Arctic and its engagement with “outsiders” in the author’s youth. These “outsiders” took children from Arctic islands and relocated them to schools in Aklavik, locations visible on an accompanying map of Northwestern Canada, including Banks Island in the Beaufort Sea. The author was familiar with Aklavik before she became a student herself: She talks about traveling “across the open ocean […] and through the tangled Mackenzie River delta” to make yearly supply runs (3). She saw the nuns and priests who came from Europe and spoke French-Canadian and worked at the schools, and the author envied that they taught students how to read.
Reading is the most important promise that the schools offer in Olemaun’s eyes. Her older half-sister, Ayouniq (also called “Rosie”), learned how to read and speak English at school, and Olemaun continually badgers her for information about school and books. Ayouniq evades questions about the school but ultimately reveals, “They take everything” (6). This warning is not a deterrent for Olemaun. Throughout the chapter, she begs her father to enroll her at the school.
Initially, her father refuses. Her father attended the school himself but “rarely spoke of the school and would never tell me of the wonderful things I could learn there” (8). He starts revealing more information about school, and it is all negative. He tells her that the knowledge the school disseminates is “for their own profit” and is not relevant to survival in the Arctic (10). He tells her that they force students into “scratchy outsiders’ clothes,” replace the songs and dances of their youth, and tell the pupils that “the spirit inside of you is bad and needs their forgiveness” (11). Olemaun dismisses these warnings, spinning the opportunity to attend school into pure positives in her mind.
As the summer approaches and the ice begins to melt (eventually allowing the yearly passage to the mainland), Olemaun finally succeeds in convincing her father to send her to school, though he does so reluctantly. He gives in and hugs her tightly, and she runs off to tell her mother her good news. Olemaun, though, “could tell she did not think it was such terrific news” though.
Chapter 2 Summary
Olemaun’s family travels via schooner in their “spring migration” along with their neighbors from Banks Island. A five-day trip lands her in Tuktoyaktuk, a coastal settlement on the mainland. All the while, Olemaun eagerly anticipates the final stages of the journey that will deliver her to school, where she will learn how to read.
Even aside from the prospect of school, the mainland is exciting. The Hudson’s Bay Company trading post “was a magical place” with “everything a person could ever need, from furniture to ladies’ dresses, from rifles to candy” (19). Large shops of this kind did not exist on the distant islands to the north.
Olemaun’s parents make final, unsuccessful efforts to deter her from attending school, reminding her that the staff will cut her hair, make her work hard, and be unkind. Olemaun’s mother buys her school supplies. Olemaun spots the school. She sees uniformed children working in a “silty garden” outside and assumes that they are being punished for being naughty. The size of the buildings on the school’s campus—the school and its hospital—strike Olemaun. The next day, she sees some more students arrive by boat, some “with solemn faces, some of them crying” (23).
The fear and intimidation sink in for Olemaun in her last moments with her parents. She tells herself, “I can manage” (26). A nun greets Olemaun and her parents with a condescending remark about finally coming to their senses and takes Olemaun inside “without giving me a chance to say goodbye” (28). She sees her mother crying before she loses sight of them.
Introduction-Chapter 2 Analysis
The first chapters of the book offer a glimpse of the social world of Inuvialuit communities in the High Arctic and the proximate Canadian mainland communities populated by Anglo-Canadians and Western European religious workers. Together with the Preface, these chapters reveal that Margaret-Olemaun’s story will function as a microcosm that illustrates the large and destructive history of residential schools for Indigenous children in Canada.
There is foreshadowing in the text that reveals that there is horror to come. Some of the language used to recount history insinuates the damaging impact of colonialism on Indigenous communities. For example, the author says that “‘outsiders’ came flitting about the North” and “plucked” children from their island homes to “nests they called schools” on the mainland (3). The term “outsiders” communicates the cultural distance between the groups of people meeting, and the image of “flitting about” communicates a busy but possibly misguided energy in their actions. The use of the verb “to pluck” communicates a lack of consent and even violence (one thinks of plucking a bird of its feathers, which would be painful and damaging to a live animal). While “nests” might communicate a sense of home and protection, the full phrase “nests they called schools” transmits to the reader that “school” would not be the appropriate word to describe these places of learning. The reader soon learns that the nests were like traps, or, to use another of Margaret-Olemaun’s descriptors, prisons.
The early communication between Olemaun and her older half-sister also reveal the great cultural divide between the world of the colonizers and the Indigenous world of the Inuvialuit. Ayouniq reads from Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, and Olemaun suspects that Alice followed the rabbit down the rabbit hole because she was hunting him. It is quite surprising to her that the character would simply pursue the rabbit “into that long, dark tunnel, all for curiosity” (5). The story does not reflect the realities and important childhood lessons of life in places like Banks Island.
When her parents drop her off at school, Olemaun’s father reminds her that she will not be able to go home for a long time. The author writes, “‘I know,’ I said, but I didn’t […] I did not yet understand how long a year was” (26). She then states that she was to become a “prisoner” there, not just for a single year but two, as a short summer would prevent travel across the ocean. These retrospective details in the author’s voice dramatize the early segment of the author’s story and establish an ominous tone that will be matched by the melancholy and horror of later sections.
