Her father finally agrees to let her make the five-day journey to attend school - where she would face the terrors of residential schools.Ī 10th anniversary edition of the picture book was released in 2020. (Betsy Trumpener)įatty 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. school library before a presentation on 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.īook authors Christy Jordan-Fenton and Margaret Pokiak-Fenton, with family in a B.C. 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. 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. She had a strong desire to learn how to read and begged to go to the school, despite its horrific reputation. She spent her early years on Banks Island going on hunting trips by dogsled and taking dangerous treks across the Arctic Ocean.Īt the age of eight, she travelled to Aklavik, a fur trading settlement founded by her great-grandfather, to attend the Catholic residential school there. Pokiak-Fenton was born on Holman Island in the Arctic Ocean in a nomadic family. Pokiak-Fenton's publisher Annick Press shared the news of her death on June 2, 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.
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