Fatty Legs: A True Story

Fatty Legs: A True Story is the 2010 autobiographical account of author Margaret-Olemaun Pokiak-Fenton’s childhood experience in one of Canada’s residential schools for Indigenous children in the 19th and 20th centuries. This study guide is based on the 10th anniversary edition, in which several supplemental chapters written by Pokiak-Fenton’s daughter-in-law explain the larger context of colonialism that created the residential school system. These residential schools represented an attempt to strip Indigenous students of their cultural identities and supplant their Indigenous educations and upbringings with the English language and cultural markers of “Western” (White-European-influenced) cultures.

At eight years old, Olemaun Pokiak (her birth name) left her home on Banks Island, within the ancestral homelands of her Inuvialuit community (the Inuit people of the Northwestern Arctic in present-day Canada) and went to the residential Catholic school in Aklavik, on the mainland. Intimidation, humiliation, abuse, and suffering marked Margaret-Olemaun’s schooling experience. Her recollections match the patterns of thousands of other residential school students who have published accounts or given interviews of their time in residential schools across the continent (a similar system extended through the U.S. and was marked by the same assimilation mission and abusive treatment of pupils). The title Fatty Legs comes from a nickname that other students used to torment Margaret-Olemaun author after a cruel nun made her wear unflattering bright red stockings while the other girls wore gray. The story of the two school years, however, is ultimately one about triumph, perseverance, and resilience.

In a report produced by Canada’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission—a government body created to collect data on residential school history and educate modern Canadians on the past and present effects of misguided assimilationist policy—the commission determined that the residential schools constituted “cultural genocide.” While the system and concurrent policies diminished Indigenous populations, ignored tribal sovereignty, and damaged Native communities, Indigenous peoples and their diverse cultures managed to survive, even if they were altered by outsiders. Told in the voice of an Indigenous protagonist, the book offers readers a first-hand account of historical anti-Indigenous racism and a story that exemplifies how the targeted populations adapted, resisted, and retained their cultures and identities.