Fatty Legs: A True Story

Margaret-Olemaun’s story reminds readers that as Indigenous people endured the violence and injustice of the system of colonialism, they experienced its various elements on a daily basis and in individual circumstances. Margaret-Olemaun’s experience at residential school is emblematic of many similar stories, but it is also unique. Children at schools witnessed elements of the colonial structure without being experts about its history, methods, or implications—that type of analysis happens after the fact and with anti-colonial education. While at school, children had only their own experiences and the stories they heard in their own social circles to formulate a critique of the institutions. Their impressions, therefore, came from the treatment they received by colonial officials and school staff.

The Introduction briefly mentions Canada’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission, which exposed the trauma of the residential school system as a critical piece of the cultural genocide that colonizers launched in North America. The Commission interviewed thousands of residential school students, collecting stories like Margaret-Olemaun’s and deciphering patterns of mental, emotional, and physical abuse the system created. The wide collection of personal accounts, however, also reveals that the history is complicated (as most history is). Not every student had a universally negative experience at school among new peer groups and with teachers/mentors.