Fatty Legs Read online

  FOR MY THREE LITTLE INSPIRATIONS—Qugyuk, Aklak, and Paniktuaq—and their loving father, my husband, Garth. None of this would have been possible without your patience. For Penny Howe, my grade 7/8 teacher: thank you for sharing with a young girl that people as fantastic as you came from the same place as people like me. For Brad Hawranik, my first section commander: I still think of you as one of the finest role models I have ever known. And, for Margaret: you have given us a powerful gift. Thank you for being brave enough to share your story.

  —Christy

  FOR MY LATE HUSBAND, LYLE, who helped me to work through the many fears I carried with me from residential school. Your love gave me courage. And, for our children, their husbands and wives, and our many grandchildren.

  —Margaret

  Olemaun, who was later called Margaret, at home on Banks Island. Here she stands (on the right) with two of her younger sisters, Elizabeth and Mabel.

  Contents

  Introduction

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  After The Story

  The Schools

  Olemaun’s Scrapbook

  Acknowledgments

  Photo Credits

  Introduction

  MY NAME IS OLEMAUN POKIAK—that’s OO-lee-mawn—but some of my classmates used to call me “Fatty Legs.” They called me that because a wicked nun forced me to wear a pair of red stockings that made my legs look enormous. But I put an end to it. How? Well, I am going to let you in on a secret that I have kept for more than 60 years: the secret of how I made those stockings disappear.

  Chapter ONE

  WHEN I WAS A YOUNG GIRL, outsiders came flitting about the North. They plucked us from our homes on the scattered islands of the Arctic Ocean and carried us back to the nests they called schools, in Aklavik.

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  Three times I had made the five-day journey to Aklavik with my father, across the open ocean, past Tuktoyaktuk, and through the tangled Mackenzie River delta, to buy supplies. I was mesmerized on each trip by the spectacle of the strange dark-cloaked nuns, whose tongues flickered with French-Canadian accents, and the pale-skinned priests who had traveled across a different ocean from a far-off land called Belgium. They held the key to the greatest of the outsiders’ mysteries—reading.

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  My older half-sister, Ayouniq, had been plucked before I was born, but we called her “Rosie” after her return. She would tell me nothing about the school tucked away in the maze of the delta, where she had gone for four years, but when I was seven she did read to me from a collection of beautifully colored books my father had given her for Christmas. The stories were precious treasures to be enjoyed in the well-lit, toasty warmth of our smoke-scented tent, as the darkness of winter was constant, and the temperatures outside were cold enough to freeze bare skin in seconds. The books were written in English, so I understood very little of them. I was always left with many unanswered questions.

  “What’s a rabbit?” I asked Rosie in our language, Inuvialuktun.

  “It’s like a hare,” she told me, lifting her eyes from Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland.

  “Oh. Well, why did Alice follow it down the hole? To hunt it?”

  Rosie gave me a funny look. “No, Olemaun. She followed it because she was curious.”

  I tried to imagine being Alice, as the large cookstove crackled behind me. She was brave to go into that long, dark tunnel, all for curiosity.

  “What was it like?”

  Rosie looked up from the book again. “What was what like?”

  “The outsiders’ school.”

  “I don’t know. You ask too many questions,” she said. Her face grew dark in the light of the coal oil lamp. She closed the book and looked away.

  Inuvialuktun: the language of the Inuvialuit, who are Aboriginal people of the western Arctic.

  “It must have been exciting to live with the outsiders.”

  She shrugged her shoulders and dropped the book on the table.

  “But they taught you how to read...”

  Rosie was silent.

  “Please,” I begged, tugging at her leg as she got up from the table and slipped on her Mother Hubbard parka.

  “They cut our hair because our mothers weren’t there to braid it for us.”

  “I don’t need my mother to braid my hair. I can do it myself.”

  “They’d cut it anyway. They always cut the little ones’ hair.”

  “I’m not that little.”

  “They don’t care. They don’t have the patience to wait for you to braid your hair. They want all of your time for chores and for kneeling on your knees to ask forgiveness.”

  “Oh, well. It’s only hair.”

  “It isn’t just your hair, Olemaun. They take everything,” she said, slipping her feet inside her kamik.

  Mother Hubbard parka: the traditional parka worn by Inuvialuit women of the western Arctic.

  “Well, can you at least finish reading me the story?”

  Rosie gave me an icy look. “You want to know about the school so much, you can go there and learn to read for yourself.” She turned, pulled apart the flaps of the tent door, and disappeared through the tunnel in the snow that formed the entrance to our home. I ran after her down the dark corridor, but she was already gone into the pitch-black afternoon of the Arctic winter. She knew that our father would not let me go to school. He had told the outsiders “No” the past four summers they had come for me. Rosie was lucky that her aunt had allowed her to go.

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  ONE DAY AT THE end of February 1944, when the sun had just begun to return to the sky, my father took me hunting with him. We traveled by dogsled for several hours, until we came to a place where game was plentiful.

  “Father,” I said when we finally stopped, “can I go to the school this year?”

  kamik/kamak: a type of boot worn by the Inuit. Also called mukluks.

  “No,” he said.

  “But you and Rosie both went, and I will be eight in June when the ice melts.”

  He raised his hand, silencing me, and motioned for me to return to the dogsled. Atop a distant hill stood a wolf, its silhouette stark in the afternoon twilight. My father had it in the sights of his rifle. A shot cracked through the air, killing my chance to convince him.

  When he returned to the dogsled with the wolf carcass, his knit brow and hard eyes told me that he was finished discussing the matter. I cringed under the cold flash of defeat, but I was careful not to talk any further about my desire to go to school. Instead, I held it inside all through the long months that followed.

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  My father rarely spoke of the school and would never tell me of the wonderful things I could learn there. He was a smart man who loved to read, but he put little value in the outsiders’ learning compared to the things that our people knew.

  But my heart would not give up hope. I climbed the cemetery hill and stared out over the sleeping, stone-still water each day, waiting for the sea to come alive with waves. Sometimes, I brought the book with me, the one about the girl named Alice who followed the hare-like creature down the burrow. I looked at the pictures and remembered the tea party she had, and how her body had become small and large again. But I still did not know what happened to her at the end of that burrow. Did she catch the hare?

  IN LATE MAY, WHEN the sun stood constant watch in the sky and night traversed it only briefly like the shadow of a passing bird’s wing, I found my father preparing the hides of animals he had collected from his trapline. I knew the topic was forbidden, but
I could not silence my heart another day. I asked him once again to allow me to go to school.

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  “The outsiders do not teach you how to hunt,” he said, pointing his knife at the fox he was about to skin. “They only use your knowledge of making snares for their own profit and send you to gather the animals from their traplines. They do not teach you how to cure meat and clean fish so that you can live off of the land. They feed you cabbage soup and porridge. They do not teach you how to make parkas and kamik,” he said, eyeing the beautifully crafted Delta braid on my parka and the embroidered, fur-lined boots on my feet. “They make you wear their scratchy outsiders’ clothes, which keep out neither the mosquitoes nor the cold. They teach you their songs and dances instead of your own. And they tell you that the spirit inside of you is bad and needs their forgiveness.”

  I had already learned a lot about hunting, trapping, and curing foods. My friend Agnes, who was 10, had already gone to the school. She told me that the nuns made you sew all of the time. It would not be difficult to learn to sew parkas and kamik if I was used to sewing all of the time. And how could I ever forget our songs and our dances? They were a part of me. But I had once heard the outsiders’ beautiful chants resonating from the church in Tuktoyaktuk, and I dreamed of learning to make such music. I would be careful to stay out of trouble, and no one would say I had to kneel and ask forgiveness. They would see that my spirit was good.

  Delta braid: a decoration made by cutting patterns from long strips of fabric and layering them on each other; used to decorate Mother Hubbard parkas.

  I would be patient, but I would not give up. I would wait and ask my father again.

  Time melted away. My eighth birthday came and went. The sea began to wake from its slumber, and I knew it would not be long before the ice broke from the shore and was carried out to be swallowed by the ocean. Soon all of us—my father and the other hunters and trappers, along with their families—would leave our winter home on Banks Island to carry boatloads of pelts to Aklavik. The outsiders had many islands to scour for children during the short summer season, and ours was a long distance from Aklavik. As it was so far for them to travel, it was unlikely that we would be there when they came. My father was my only hope.

  One day in late June, I looked up from staring at the book I was so desperate to read and saw that the enormous splintering chunks of ice had left enough of a gap to allow us passage. I slammed the book shut, sped down the hill, and ran along the rocky shore as fast as I could—which was fast, because my legs were muscular and strong. I was determined and ready to ask again. “Father, Father, please, Father... Pleeease, can I go to school this year?” I huffed in heavy breaths, darting through the small groups of men who were loading the schooners for the journey.

  My father heaved a bale of white fox pelts over the edge of the North Star. His answer had not changed: “No.”

  “Please, please, pleeease,” I begged. “You can drop me at Aklavik when you go for supplies.”

  My father paused to swat a mosquito. He looked into my eyes. “You are a stubborn girl,” he told me, “and the outsiders do not like stubborn children.”

  “Please,” I said again. “Please.”

  He crouched to my height. He picked up a rock with one of his hands and held it out to me. “Do you see this rock? It was once jagged and full of sharp, jutting points, but the water of the ocean slapped and slapped at it, carrying away its angles and edges. Now it is nothing but a small pebble. That is what the outsiders will do to you at the school.”

  “But Father, the water did not change the stone inside the rock. Besides, I am not a rock. I am a girl, I can move. I am not stuck upon the shore for eternity.”

  schooner: a type of sailing vessel with masts.

  “You are a clever one,” he said, touching my cheek and then looking down at the book in my hand.

  “Does that mean I can go?” My hope blossomed, billowing beneath my parka.

  He looked deep into my eyes, the rock held tightly in his fist. “I suppose it is the only way I will hear the end of it.”

  I turned to run and tell my mother the news, but my father reached for me and pulled me in. He held me in his arms for a long time, the fur of his parka pressed against my face, so that I could hardly breathe. When he finally let go, I did not give him a single moment to change his mind. Even faster than I had run to the shore, I ran back up to my mother, who was in our tent packing up the belongings we would need for the journey.

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  “Mother, Mother!” I shouted as I rushed through the entrance. “Father says I can go to school this year!”

  She did not say a word. Instead, she set my little sister down on a caribou hide, pushed past me out of the tent, and headed straight for him.

  I could tell she did not think it was such terrific news.

  Chapter TWO

  THE SCHOONERS WERE FULL to the gunwales with a winter’s worth of pelts for trading. Everything we needed for the trip had been packed from our tents. The men used long poles to pry the boats free of the shore, where they were stored for the winter, and a system of pulleys to pull them back into the water. Planks were laid down to bridge the gap between the shore and the schooners, and we all climbed aboard and prepared for our spring migration.

  Stefansson expedition: the Arctic expedition of 1913 to 1916, organized by Vilhjalmur Stefansson, a Canadian explorer of Icelandic descent.

  We traveled with six other schooners, each carrying as many as six or seven families. Our schooner was the North Star. It was owned by Mr. Carpenter and Mr. Wolki, but had once been part of the famous Stefansson expedition’s fleet. We stayed aboard the ships for the entire five-day journey.

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  Five days may not seem like much, but to me it might as well have been a year. From the first day, I searched for signs that we were nearing the mainland. The voyage across the ocean was fraught with anticipation, and when we finally reached Tuktoyaktuk, I felt both happiness that we had made it that far and sadness that we still had a long way to go. Beyond Tuktoyaktuk, the pingos rose out of the ocean like goose eggs with smashed-in tops. We passed them and entered the mouth of the Mackenzie River. The Richardson Mountains cut into the horizon far off to the southwest, and small, sparse trees lined the shores. We came to Reindeer Station, a settlement of herders, and excitement consumed me. We would soon be heading up the Peel River, the last leg of our journey.

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  Sometime after lunch, on the final day, the noise of children playing reached our ears, and we could see spiraling towers of smoke rising high into the sky from many campfires. A dozen boats as large as whales were tethered to the bank. We had made it! We had reached Aklavik!

  pingos: when ice forms in the ground during winter months, it pushes the surface earth up into small hills, or pingos, which grow bigger year after year. The name pingo comes from the Inuvialuktun word for small hill.

  After our schooner was secured and a large board was laid over the side of the North Star, we children were given permission to go and seek out our friends and cousins, who had also arrived to sell their pelts and stock up on supplies for the year. We made our way down the plank and scrambled up the steep muddy slope to the settlement our own great-grandfather, Old Man Pokiak, had founded as a trading post.

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  LATER THAT DAY, AFTER my father had sold his winter’s catch of furs, my mother came to find me. I was giddy with excitement, knowing what was to come. I tossed the caribou-hide ball I was playing with high into the air, leaving a cluster of children scrambling for it, as I followed my mother to the Hudson’s Bay Company. The Hudson’s Bay Company was a magical place. They sold everything a person could ever need, from furniture to ladies’ dresses, from rifles to candy.

  Hudson’s Bay Company: the oldest surviving company in North America, incorporated by a royal charter in 1670. Hunters and trappers
traded their pelts there for goods and supplies.

  My mother stopped me on the stairs before I could race into the small treasure-packed timber building. She took one of my long braids in her hand. “You know, the nuns will cut your hair. Are you sure you still want to attend the school?”

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  “Yes,” I told her and tried to make my face very serious.

  “They will make you work hard. Harder than you do when you help your father.”

  “I am strong,” I said, pushing my shoulders back.

  “They will not be kind to you. They are not your family, and they are not like us.”

  “I will have Agnes. I will be fine. You will see.”

  My mother sure seemed to know a lot about a place she had never been. I figured she was trying to scare me. Life would be more difficult without me there to help her with the smaller children, and she was likely jealous of my opportunity to learn to read.

  “Well then, we had better go in and find you some new stockings to keep your legs warm underneath your uniform.”

  My mother bought me some strange-smelling soap, a comb to keep my hair neat, a brush for my teeth, and something in a white tube. She also bought me a thick, heavy pair of gray stockings. They were like the kind I had seen the outsiders wear, the kind that pull up above your knees. I wanted to put them on right away, but my mother told me I had to wait. I would not want to soil them before school, because the outsiders loved cleanliness.