Fatty Legs: A True Story

Debbie Reese (Nambé Pueblo), Founder of American Indians in Children’s Literature, provides a brief Foreword in the form of a letter to the reader. The letter is an exposition of the myths surrounding Indigenous literary characters and the living historical actors on which they are based. Reese says:

Most of the children’s books, television shows, movies, and lessons in your schoolbooks do not tell the truth about what happened to Indigenous Peoples when Europeans came onto their homelands several hundred years ago (viii-ix).

This type of popular culture is common and glorifies settlers and “pioneers” while ignoring or justifying the harm that colonialism did to Indigenous communities. Reese stresses, “White people did terrible things to Indigenous people” (ix), like steal land, force Indigenous people to live on reserves, and take children by force to residential schools like the one in the book. Reese champions Indigenous authors who write about Indigenous experiences and suggests many others for interested readers. She says that Indigenous people and cultures survived the governmental and vigilante attempts to eradicate them in Canada and the United States. She states that Indigenous authors offer truths that many non-Indigenous authors do not. 

In the Preface to the 10th anniversary of the book, Christy Jordan-Fenton, Margaret-Olemaun’s daughter-in-law, contextualizes the story of Fatty Legs in larger themes of Canadian and colonial histories and stresses its importance both for Inuvialuit people and for a larger society often ignorant of Indigenous histories and suffering. She describes the book as an elder’s account of retaining “her agency and determination in the face of unparalleled bullying from adults” (xiii).

Jordan-Fenton relays that at first, her mother-in-law was resistant to having her story documented because at the heart of this memory was her own disobedience and “the secret of what she did with her stockings” (xiii), but she eventually agreed and went on to see her story translated into multiple languages and published in multiple editions. Pain and trauma are also at the center of the story. Recounting this abusive and terrifying episode in her past forced Margaret-Olemaun to undergo “a painful exfoliation of shame” and to muster “so much bravery” (xiv-xv). The payoff for Indigenous communities has been massive: Other survivors have followed Margaret-Olemaun’s lead and shared their stories and come together to heal.

Jordan-Fenton compares the story of Fatty Legs to that of a fairy tale in which the hero faces seemingly insurmountable odds to emerge victorious. The villains in Fatty Legs, however, were real; the system that created them was real and, in many ways, is still functioning through its legacies. Margaret-Olemaun is also a very real hero who, “with exceptional strength of spirit and cleverness, and under the most horrific and powerless circumstances imaginable […] survived” (xvi). She embodies the “spiritual fortitude and wit” of Indigenous children and sets the example for every young reader (xvi).