Fatty Legs: A True Story

The 10th anniversary edition of Fatty Legs concludes with a few short chapters written by Christy Jordan-Fenton, Margaret-Olemaun’s daughter-in-law. The Afterword directly addresses colonialism and the residential school system. She explains that even when children were abused at schools, they carried with them “the ancestral knowledge of all the generations of grandparents before them to know how to live comfortably where they were” (85). In this framework, the children have power from their culture and their long family lines. This is not necessarily a familiar or shared understanding of self to non-Indigenous readers, but it is essential to the authors of the book and the tens of thousands of children who attended these schools. Jordan-Fenton explains that the schools took children away from advanced tasks they performed in their home communities and exploited them for “menial jobs for the outsiders who were taking over their territories” (86). She similarly refrains from sugarcoating other horrors: the push to eradicate Indigenous languages, bringing kids to school by kidnapping them, and the poor living conditions that ranged from bad food to harsh discipline by unqualified and occasionally criminal teachers (86-87).

Jordan-Fenton reminds the reader that these conditions had intense and lasting psychological effects on the children.