Margaret Pokiak-Fenton, co-author of bestselling children's book Fatty Legs, dead at 84
Vicky Qiao | | Posted: June 3, 2021 4:57 PM | Last Updated: June 3, 2021
Margaret-Olemaun Pokiak-Fenton, the Inuvialuit knowledge keeper, residential school survivor and co-author of bestselling book Fatty Legs: A True Story, is dead at 84.
Pokiak-Fenton's publisher Annick Press shared the news of her death on June 2, 2021.
Pokiak-Fenton was born on Holman Island in the Arctic Ocean in a nomadic family. She spent her early years on Banks Island going on hunting trips by dogsled and taking dangerous treks across the Arctic Ocean.
At the age of eight, she travelled to Aklavik, a fur trading settlement founded by her great-grandfather, to attend the Catholic residential school there. She had a strong desire to learn how to read and begged to go to the school, despite its horrific reputation.
It was this experience that inspired her bestselling picture book Fatty Legs: A True Story, which was co-written with her daughter-in-law, Christy Jordan-Fenton.
The pair also wrote A Stranger At Home, When I Was Eight and Not My Girl, introducing many young readers to the horrors of residential schools.
The two co-authors toured Canada, making over 100 school and library visits yearly and traveling internationally to the United States and Cuba.
Fatty Legs is about eight-year-old Margaret who has set her sights on learning to read, even though it means leaving her village in the high Arctic. Her father finally agrees to let her make the five-day journey to attend school — where she would face the terrors of residential schools.
A 10th anniversary edition of the picture book was released in 2020.
A recollection of her life's story, the book was published two years before the work of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission began and was among the first children's books from a survivor of Canada's Indian Residential School System.
"I would tell stories because I wanted my grandkids to know about life up North ... When I got to [residential] school, I didn't see [my parents] for two years, and I completely forgot my language, the food and everything," Pokiak-Fenton said in a 2020 interview with Shelagh Rogers on CBC Radio's The Next Chapter.
Pokiak-Fenton met with thousands of school children to share her experiences, and a message of hope and survival, so that future generations would understand the devastating legacy of the schools.
"I had this passion that everybody should know that this happened," she said.
"When we do school visits, little children are so receptive to the book. It's because they have a clear mind and they don't have any clutter. It's so beautiful to see."