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My raw fingers stung as I opened the door to an explosion of excitement. Agnes was giddily twirling around her bed. She kicked up a leg to show me.
“New stockings,” she chirped, as I pulled my own slouching pair back up over my knees. “Aren’t they beautiful? I bet they belonged to a fancy Toronto lady. Everyone is getting new stockings!”
Maybe the outsiders had come to their senses: I might just survive another winter of the Raven’s education if I could get my hands on some new stockings. I stripped off my old ones and threw them on the pile, praying for a nice black pair, like Agnes’s. I closed my eyes and waited my turn.
The Raven swooped in. “I saved a special pair for you,” she said.
I stared. I closed my eyes again and slowly opened them wider and wider. I looked to the other girls and examined their stockings, and then turned back to my own.
The Raven had played a heartless trick on me. Embarrassment and anger swelled in my heart. These stockings could never have belonged to a fancy lady from Toronto.
“They’re... they’re red!” I stammered.
The Raven cackled as I ran to my bed beneath the window. It was bad enough that I was much larger than the other girls, and that my calf muscles were far more pronounced than those of my skinny-legged classmates, but now I had to wear the only bright red stockings in the school. I pulled them on to see if they were really as bad as I thought. They were worse. The stockings made my legs look even bigger than they already were. I stared at my big fat red legs. I looked like a plump-legged circus clown.
The laughter of the other girls enveloped me. It wrapped a million fingers around me and would not let go. As soon as the Raven was gone, I pulled my favorite book from underneath my pillow and imagined the Raven in the role of the Queen of Hearts.
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THE NEXT MORNING, I crept into the refectory late, my calves on fire in those hideous stockings. A buzz filled the room and swarmed about the tables. I felt dizzy. Every eye was burning into my legs. I wanted to dissolve into my bowl of mush.
Katherine turned and pointed. “Fatty Legs,” she laughed, bits of food spilling from her mouth.
“Fatty Face,” I called back.
The Raven caught me by the ear. “If you cannot eat nicely with the other children, maybe you would be happier tending to the dirty laundry for the rest of the week,” she said. “Now, get going. There’s a fire waiting for you.”
I could hardly will my feet to move under the weight of my big fat red legs, knowing that everyone was getting a good look at them as I sidled down the aisle and out the door of the dining hall.
My chest ached. As I stirred the dirty clothing, a tear escaped my eye. It fell from my chin onto the scalding cast iron vat.
Ptsch.
The tear bubbled and vanished with a poof of steam.
“Aha!” I whispered. In that moment, I knew how I would stop all of this Fatty Legs business.
I had only to await my chance.
FOR THE NEXT FEW DAYS, the other girls made sounds like the heavy beat of a drum when I walked by. “Boom! Boom! Boom!” they called.
They could go ahead and have their laugh at my expense. It would be short-lived. Although when they started calling Agnes “Skinny Legs,” I felt like setting out across the ice and walking home, then and there. Katherine teased Agnes so mercilessly that one day, for the very first time, Agnes did not pick me first to be on her team at recreation time. My resolve hardened. I could not lose my best friend.
The time had come to put my plan into action. Each morning as I pulled up my red stockings, my spirit rose. All I needed was opportunity.
On Sunday, my last day in the laundry room, it came. I looked around to make sure I was alone. The Raven usually went to her room after church to listen to the radio, and the Brother who helped to stoke the fire had gone out for a cigarette. I stripped off the stockings, and in one quick motion, shoved them into the blazing fire beneath the vat. The hideous things sizzled and crackled in the fire as they shrank before my eyes and vaporized into a thin wisp of smoke.
I smiled with satisfaction. I would not be bested. The Raven was about to find out what I was made of, and was she ever in for a shock.
She flailed like a fish on the ice when she noticed my bare legs, and threw her hands up in the air. “How dare you enter the refectory without your stockings? You will be dressed appropriately at all times. Now, go back and put them on this instant.”
“I can’t,” I told her.
“And why not?”
“I just can’t.”
She could scream all she wanted. It wouldn’t bring them back.
She rose from the table. “Margaret, you go back to your room and get those stockings, right now.”
“They aren’t there.”
“Margaret Pokiak.” Her beady black eyes bore holes into me. “I will find those stockings. Rest assured.”
The hatchlings weren’t giggling anymore. Everyone had to help in the search. We tore the crowded dorm room apart and scoured the whole school from top to bottom. We emptied our trunks and the nuns rummaged through our belongings. The Raven had each girl strip her bedding and flip her mattress.
“You had better tell her where those stockings are,” Katherine said to me.
“Nope,” I said. “No one’s going to call me Fatty Legs, ever again.”
“You think you’re pretty brave, don’t you?” She leaned forward and fixed her eyes on me, but I wasn’t scared of her. I stood my ground.
“You are brave, Margaret,” said Sister MacQuillan, stepping around the corner. Katherine moved away from me and rejoined the other Gwich’in girls. The Swan handed me a key. “Go and get your stockings from the storeroom.”
Agnes met my eyes from where she stood over her upturned mattress and smiled.
It was time for lights out when I returned with the stockings. I would have to wait until the next morning to put them on.
When the morning came, I put on my beautiful thick pair of gray wool stockings. They were gorgeous. After our chores and prayers, I ran back up to the dormitory bursting with pride. I danced between the beds, whirling around for so long that I missed breakfast. I was eager to get to class on time, though. I sprang down the hallway stairs, like a gray-legged wolf.
The Raven choked on the claw she had been nibbling, as I strutted my sleek new legs past her desk. Her face turned as red as seal’s blood on snow. Sister MacQuillan stepped through the doorway and headed straight for the Raven. She whispered something in her ear, and the Raven blew up like a ptarmigan balloon. Her ears nearly popped off. Then Sister MacQuillan tilted her head gracefully in my direction. A faint smile crossed her lips. I knew the Raven would no longer be free to “educate” me as much as she had been.
The Raven thought she was there to teach me a few things, but in the end, I think it was she who learned a lesson: Be careful what birds you choose to pluck from their nests. A wren can be just as clever as a raven.
Chapter SEVEN
AT TIMES, I FELT as though my parents might forget me—forget that they had a daughter in a faraway school. And the dream returned often. The one in which I was trapped beneath the weight of the Raven’s habit. I would never escape.
School ended, once again, and I soberly prepared for another summer of delivering meals to the sick and wishing I were back home. However, with the first boats came a new letter. It asked that I travel to Tuktoyaktuk on one of the school’s boats. My family would meet me there. They wanted me to come home! The first time my father had written to me in English, it was to say he would not be coming for me. That letter had been painful to read. Now, at last, I could revel in each of the words he had penned on the page. I had not been forgotten. His letter proved it.
I couldn’t wait to put the Raven at my back and some distance between us. The only outsider I would miss would be Sister MacQuillan. I could not leave without thanking her, so after I had packed my things
, I went to her office.
“I am grateful for your kindness,” I told her.
“You are a strong child. You will go far in life.” She touched the top of my head and a tingle ran down to my toes. Then she pulled a book from her drawer and gave it to me. “I know how much you love this one.”
It was my very own copy of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. “Thank you,” I said, taking the book and pressing it to my chest.
“You will be very missed, Margaret.” She paused a moment. Then she changed her words: “You will be very missed, Olemaun.”
She had called me by my name—the name I had not heard in two years. Hearing it now brought tears to my eyes.
“Qugyuk,” I said, pointing to her. It was the name I had always associated with her: Swan.
Sister MacQuillan elongated her neck and raised her arms like she would take flight. We both giggled. I was sorry that I would not see the swan-like Sister again. I was sure that once I told my father about the Raven, he would never allow me to return to school.
THE TRIP TO TUKTOYAKTUK aboard the Roman Catholic boat, the Immaculata, was crowded. We had no choice but to sit quietly as hour after hour drifted by and turned to day after day. The journey back to the ocean took much longer than the journey into the delta had because many children had to be dropped off on the way down the Peel and Mackenzie Rivers. Wherever the boat stopped, we children would scramble up the banks of the shore and run around wildly, stretching our legs and enjoying the space.
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When we reached the mouth of the Mackenzie River, the saltwater smell of the bay unlocked distant memories and made me long for Banks Island. At that point, I was truly free of the outsiders’ school. I had left it behind me, back past the tree line in a tangled cluster of waterways. After two long years, I was out on the open water, where I belonged. Each nightless day in that tiny boat had taken forever to pass. Now we were so close!
We made our way across the bay to Tuktoyaktuk, and there was the North Star, anchored in the harbor. The moment was here at last. The Immaculata had only grazed the shore when I gave Agnes a quick hug and leaped from the boat. The Brothers couldn’t stop me.
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My father stood right there on the shore. He would have given them a what for if they had tried.
I was safe.
But my mother didn’t know me.
“Not my girl,” she told the Brothers. “Not my girl.”
Those three words thudded between my ears, over and over, and I feared the Brothers would take me away with them again. I had not seen my mother in two years. She remembered a pale eight-year-old with pudgy cheeks. I was now tall, lean, very tanned, and ten years old.
My father knew me right away. He wrapped his arms around my body, and after a moment, so did my mother and siblings.
My mother had brought a small package of all of the things that I had liked to eat, assuming that I would be eager to try them once again. However, the food was strange and difficult to eat. It felt greasy and was salty, with a strong smell. I was not sure I would ever be able to eat it. My mother cried and said I was now an outsider. On the way to our camp, she asked my father to buy me some of their outsider-food from the Hudson’s Bay store in Tuktoyaktuk. He laughed and told her that I was still Inuvialuit, and when I got hungry enough, I would eat. Eventually, I did.
Before bed that first night, I read to my family from the book that Sister MacQuillan had given me. When I was done, I crawled under the warm hides, gazed at the glow of the embers from my father’s pipe, and drifted off to sleep.
My curiosity had led me far away, and now here I was, after two years, satisfied that I now knew what happened to girls who went down rabbit holes.
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After THE STORY
THE YEAR FOLLOWING MY return home was one of the happiest of my life. The excitement of hunting with my father, the pleasures of fishing with my mother, and the fun of seeking out goose eggs with my siblings all held new wonder for me. I was certain that I would not go back to the school in Aklavik for anything.
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However, my three younger sisters grew curious. After they pestered my father non-stop, and the government made school attendance a condition for receiving child benefits, he gave in and agreed that they, too, could go and learn to read. I tried to warn them, just as Rosie had tried to warn me. Their hair would be cut, I told them. They would have to do many chores and kneel on their knees to ask for forgiveness. It was no use.
We Inuvialuit are headstrong. Thankfully, we are also resilient. So, reluctantly, I went with them—to make sure that they did not forget that wrens can be just as clever as ravens and owls.
The SCHOOLS
ABORIGINAL CHILDREN LIKE Margaret Pokiak learned many special skills that allowed them to cope with the natural environments they lived in. For example, by the time she was 10, Margaret could command her own dogsled team. As Europeans spread throughout North America, their quest to expand into new territories led them to seek ways to remove the people who already inhabited the land. One way of doing this was to send Aboriginal children to live at church-run schools where their traditional skills were replaced by those that would equip them to function in menial jobs. Though Margaret’s parents knew better, some people believed that the schools would be good places to prepare their children for the rapidly changing world. Most children, however, were forcibly taken, some even kidnapped. The churches that ran the schools were paid a fee for each child attending, so they wanted to keep enrollment high. Just as Margaret had to work at the school in Aklavik, Aboriginal children throughout the North scrubbed floors, hauled water and firewood, made traps, worked traplines, or built furniture for sale. The schools were often overcrowded and dirty, and diseases such as tuberculosis were common. As well, the teachers were often unqualified to educate the children in their care.
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At the school in Aklavik, Margaret’s clothing was taken away, her hair was cut, and she was not allowed to speak her language. The schools were meant to strip generation after generation of children of their culture and skills. In addition, children returning home were frequently considered outsiders. They could no longer speak their parents’ languages, and they had lost their knowledge of the old ways. Furthermore, many children were abused at school, leaving wounds that could take generations to heal. They were then challenged to parent their own children, without having been parented themselves. In recent years, some residential school survivors have found the courage to speak out about what happened to them.
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Today, the healing continues as many survivors, their children, and their children’s children struggle to shed the shame of oppression and reclaim pride in their identities. Communities seek peace through healing circles, relearning their languages, participating in cultural celebrations such as traditional athletic games and powwows that showcase traditional dances, drumming, songs, and handicrafts, as well as through sharing their stories, philosophies, and inspirations in all forms of art and media—including books like this one.
Olemaun’s SCRAPBOOK
Margaret and her family on the five-day journey to Aklavik. Margaret is second from the right.
My older half-sister Ayouniq had been plucked before I was born, but we called her Rosie after her return. In this photo, Rosie wears Inuvialuit-style kamiks on her feet.
Rosie turned, pulled apart the flaps of the tent door, and disappeared through the tunnel in the snow that formed the entrance to our home.
We traveled by dogsled for several hours, until we came to a place where game was plentiful.
Margaret and her father sitting on top of the schooner, the North Star.
Margaret’s mother
We traveled with six other schooners, each carrying as many as six or seven families. Our schooner was the North Star.
Beyond Tuktoyaktuk, the pingos rose out of the ocean like goose eggs
with smashed-in tops. Pingos are formed when a large lump of ice pushes soil up to make a temporary mountain.
We came to Reindeer Station, a settlement of herders,
and excitement consumed me.
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. Margaret’s great grandfather poses with his family in Aklavik, 1922. When Margaret went to school, the houses in Aklavik were similar to this one.
A tractor drives past the Hudson’s Bay Company store in Aklavik.
Behind them stood two immense wooden buildings, so much larger than our schooner, with rows and rows of windows. I had forgotten how big these buildings were. This photo, taken from the water, shows the school on the left and the hospital on the right. In the school building, the boys’ dormitory is on the left wing, while the girls’ dormitory is on the right. The classrooms are on the bottom floor.
An enormous photograph hung on one of the clean painted walls. In it, an outsider wore a fancy sash. Medallions like large coins hung from his chest—I would learn later that he was king of all of the outsiders. They told me he was also my king. This king is George VI, who ruled from 1936 to 1952.
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