Christy Jordan-Fenton is the author of four award-winning books about her Inuvialuk mother Margaret Olemaun Pokiak-Fenton’s time attending an Indian Residential School in the high Arctic during the 1940s. Though Margaret passed in 2021, with her blessing Christy has continued to share her story in trauma-informed and strengths-based ways.
When eight-year-old Olemaun leaves her home in the high Arctic to attend a faraway residential school, her dreams of learning to read quickly turn into a nightmare. Trapped at a school where the adults are her biggest tormentors, and forced to wear bright red stockings that earn her the name “Fatty Legs”, she must become her own hero. The true story of Margaret Olemaun Pokiak-Fenton.
Interviewed by Caley Byrne
Caley Byrne (CB): This wonderful and ultimately uplifting book deals with incredibly challenging topics like displacement, childhood humiliation, and residential schools. How do you find the balance between sharing the truth while still appealing to a young audience?
Christy Jordan-Fenton (CJF): Seeing the story through a child’s eyes really informed how to tell the story and what to share. We found we didn’t need to talk about graphic abuse or violent horrors to get the story across. Young people connect to fears of ostracization, feeling. Or what if your mother didn’t recognize you and you couldn’t communicate with her to tell her who you are? These are some of the deepest fears of young people, so there is a great potential for impact in exploring them, while being age-appropriate. Through focusing on how a child would see the story, we were able to communicate a truth to young people about how bad the school Margaret/Olemaun attended was, while staying within the scope of their current imaginations. Stories are really just what facts we focus on out of a period of time, and how we present them, so we focused on child-relevant facts and presented them through that lens.
CB: Further to my question above, what inspired you to write about this deeply emotional experience, for a young audience instead of for an adult one?
CJF: There are a few things that influenced the choice:
Fatty Legs came about through me encouraging Margaret/Olemaun to share stories about her Inuvialuit upbringing so my children could have a sense of who they are and a relationship with their Indigeneity. Eventually, she started to talk also about her residential school experiences. So, I was coming at it already from a view that I wanted my children to know these stories and to see their grandmother as a hero. There wasn’t a lot of accurate Indigenous representation in media for children at the time, and virtually nothing for the Inuvialuit. I wanted my own children to read about their culture and have someone to look up to.
I was about the age Fatty Legs is written for when I started to question about what happened at residential schools, having been raised part of my life by a residential school survivor, and growing up around many people who had similar experiences to Margaret/Olemaun. I think I was partly answering my young self.
When I heard Margaret/Olemaun’s story I instantly thought of a Robert Munch or Roald Dahl character—when the world falls apart and all hope is burned to the ground, or when adults are unfair (and even abusive), the child is left to save themselves.
Young people engage only in the politics of empathy. There is no, “But X, Y, Z…” to justify atrocities. They get it. And then they challenge the adults in their lives to get it. Young people have a clearer way of thinking than we as adults have; it’s an honest reasoning. The way young people see the world holds a lot of medicine for healing community and society at large. The way Reconciliation has played out over the 15 years since we began working on Fatty Legs has proven that, I think.
CB: The book centres around an incredibly strong girl character who triumphs through a very difficult time. Young Olemaun’s spirit shines through so brightly from every page. Do you think you could have written this book as well as you did, if you didn’t have such a close bond with Margaret-Olemaun now?
CJF: Margaret/Olemaun’s indomitable spirit definitely influenced Fatty Legs and all the books about her. You couldn’t help but be enthralled by it! Anyone who knew her could testify to that. She was a strong character, who more than lived up to her name Olemaun, which means the stone you sharpen an ulu knife with.
We spent a great deal of time together. She began as my mother-in-law and next-door neighbour and became my mother and best friend. I think our relationship was important for building trust so she could get the story out (and much of the two years it took to get the story right was us building a closer bond) and for honouring her experiences in a way that was true to her.
Another important piece, as a side note, is that being a part of Indigenous community informs how characters are presented. When outsiders tell stories of genocide, they tend to place the power in the colonizers’ hands, and even though the colonizers are horrifically cruel and unimaginably evil there is still an element of supremacy in it. People who experience genocide don’t talk about themselves and the experiences of those in their communities that way, they talk about how they survived. Having been surrounded by Indigenous community for much of my life has been a blessing that gave me a different perspective. I didn’t even realize that until well after Fatty Legs was published and I was confronted by non-Indigenous readers who felt the story should have been told the other way.
It helped immensely that Margaret/Olemaun was the strongest example I know of a survivor owning their experience and telling it from a strengths-based way. It was paradoxical that she could tell her story where her own heroism was so evident, and yet, in the beginning, she was incredibly ashamed. A big part of the process was to tell her story back to her so she could see what she was trying to tell herself.
CB: How was the process of writing and editing this, given the story is your mother-in-law’s story?
CJF: It gave us a great opportunity to bond and mutually heal for the next generation. But it was messy and difficult sometimes. I had to learn to be patient and I had to learn to work on my own healing.
For the actual process of collaborating on the books, basically I would listen to Margaret/Olemaun tell stories when we drove to town together, or over dinner, or anytime she was sharing them. Then, when I thought I could see how the stories all fit together into a comprehensive plot, I would begin to write it out, doing research along the way, and asking questions as needed. Once I thought I had it done, I would print out a draft and take it to her. She would mark it up with a red pen telling me where I got things right, what could and couldn’t be shared, adding extra details, etc. Then I would rewrite the next drafts until she was satisfied. After a draft passed Margaret/Olemaun’s approval, I would send it to the editor, who then did something similar. I would revise again, take it back to Margaret/Olemaun, and start the process over again. Our first editor Maggie de Vries was invaluable in providing a structure for this to work, and in coaching me to help Margaret/Olemaun unearth valuable parts of the story.
CB: I was captivated by the theme of birds in the book; the Raven, the Swan, the Wren and the Hatchlings. What drew you to writing such vivid characters as kinds of birds, and why was it important to you to express them that way?
CJF: I saw a painting of a slightly anthropomorphic raven and it reminded me very much of a nun. As I was writing I was asking myself what would Margaret/Olemaun compare the people in her life to without many books and no TV. The obvious choice was animals. At the time of writing Fatty Legs I also experienced an unusual amount of rare bird happenings, such as a raven swarming. Only later did I find out that Margaret/Olemaun and her family travelled with an Ornithologist when she was a young girl. She grew up with a scientist who studied birds! Knowing that, I think I was also influenced by how often I heard her speak about birds and her knowledge of them.
CB: What is the number one thing you hope readers take away from Fatty Legs?
CJF: For us both, what we wanted most was for young people to read her story and know that no matter what atrocities and shames they have been made to endure, they have been their own heroes and they will or already have overcome. And we wanted to make space for Indigenous youth and children coming from diaspora communities to feel pride in their cultures and be inspired to find their own ways of walking with a foot in both worlds.