As we left the store, I noticed a member of the RCMP relaxing on a chair near the entrance. The Mountie was reading from one of the many richly colored books that crammed a tall column of shelves beside him. How distinguished he looked as he pulled at a pipe, a book in his hand. Soon, I, too, would be able to read.
MY PARENTS DID NOT let me go to school right away. They wanted to keep me until after the athletic games, which were held on Dominion Day, the first of July—three whole days after our arrival. July was a festive time of year for the Inuit, including us Inuvialuit, and for the Dene Nation, made up of native peoples such as the Gwich’in. Freed at last from the ice, the men would bring their families to Aklavik not only for supplies, but to also compete against each other in tests of strength. I was disappointed that I could not go to school immediately, but I did not often get to see my cousins and enjoyed visiting with them.
RCMP or Mounties: Royal Canadian Mounted Police. Canada’s national police force.
Dominion Day: Canada’s national holiday, now known as Canada Day, which is celebrated on July 1.
On the first day of the games, my father made a balloon for us by blowing up the sac from the throat of a ptarmigan. We chased each other down a long, seemingly endless street, the sound of our feet clomping and thudding against the wooden boardwalk, batting the balloon into the air and stealing it from one another. I caught it and ran. Soon I could no longer hear my sisters and cousins behind me. I had lost them.
I looked up and stopped, forgetting the balloon.
In front of me, at least a dozen children dressed in uniforms crouched in a silty garden, breaking the earth and pulling at roots with small tools. These had to be the naughty children who were made to kneel for forgiveness. 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 was where I would go to school, but I would not be like these children. I would be good and spend all of my time inside, learning to read. I batted the balloon from one hand to the other, and turned and ran back to find my cousins and my sisters.
ptarmigan: white game birds of the grouse family and the official bird of Nunavut, a territory in Canada. Also known as snow chickens.
The day after the athletic games began, a boat docked. We watched its passengers file up the beach. They were children with solemn faces, some of them crying. I searched the faces for Agnes, but she was not among them.
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“See those children,” my mother said to me. “They will be your classmates.”
“Why are they crying?” I asked.
“Because they do not want to go to the outsiders’ school.”
“Don’t they know they are going to learn to read?”
“They would rather be with their families than read,” my mother said, tightening her lips. Her words stung.
“Now that the other new children are here, it is time for us to take you to the school,” my father said, coming up behind us. “Go and gather your things.”
MY PARENTS LED ME along the same street I had run down to lose my sisters and cousins, the day before. The buildings came into view. The garden was deserted now.
“Are they both schools?” I asked my father.
“No. Only that one.” He pointed at the building on the right. “The other is the hospital where you will be trained when you are old enough. You may be asked to help out there at times.”
“Like a nurse? That sounds fun.”
My father gave me a look that said he did not think so. “The top floor is where the students sleep. The building is divided into a boys’ side and a girls’ side, and you will not be allowed to talk with the boys, even if they are your cousins.”
The school was beginning to look less inviting. I wondered how I would ever feel safe enough to sleep in such a large place. I was used to staring at the glowing coals of my father’s pipe, from where I slept under his bed, until I drifted off. It suddenly sank in. My family would not be staying with me. How would I fall asleep without that smoky red glow?
“The church is in the middle of the dorm rooms, and the classrooms and refectory are below them,” he explained.
“What is a refectory?”
“A place where many people eat together.”
My mother was silent. She did not say a word until my father had his hand on the big double doors of the school. “It is not too late to change your mind, Olemaun.”
Change my mind? I could manage. I would read myself to sleep like Rosie did. I wasn’t going to let anything stop me. I couldn’t wait to go inside.
My father placed a hand on my shoulder. “You will not be able to return home for a very long time.”
“I know,” I said, but I didn’t.
My eighth birthday had only just passed. I did not yet understand how long a year was. It had not crossed my mind that the same ice that allowed my people to travel only in the brief weeks of summer would keep me from going home. I did not know that an unusually short summer in 1945 would hold me prisoner for a second year with the Sisters, the Fathers, and the Brothers. They were not family; they were like owls and ravens raising wrens.
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My father pulled open the door, and I stepped past him. I was inside a school for the first time in my life. All around me was glass and wood. 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 the king of all of the outsiders. They told me he was also my king, but I knew that my family listened to no one but Mr. Carpenter and Mr. Wolki, who owned the North Star. The school’s smells were unfriendly and harsh against the tender skin of my inner nostrils. I craned my head in every possible direction I could, without moving my feet. It was like someone had enlarged the Hudson’s Bay Company by many times and stripped it clean. My eyes darted from wall to wall, trying to take it all in.
An outsider with a hooked nose like a beak came for me, her scraping footsteps echoing through the long, otherwise silent halls. “I am glad you have come to your senses,” she told my father in Inuvialuktun. “You certainly can’t teach her the things she needs to know.” She wrapped a dark-cloaked arm around my shoulder and ushered me away, without giving me a chance to say goodbye. I looked back and saw my father wiping tears from my mother’s face. I wanted to run to her and tell her that it would be all right, but a priest approached them right then and they walked away with him.
Chapter THREE
I FOLLOWED THE BEAKED NUN up stairs that creaked under my feet to a large room filled with beds. Across the room were seven girls, who had been among the sullen children I had seen earlier. They were standing in a somber line in front of four foul-smelling, wooden stalls along one wall. The outsider pushed me into place at the end of the row, and I nearly gagged from the odor that wafted from the stalls behind us.
Another dark-cloaked nun passed by the girls, eyeing them up and down, one by one. She clutched a large pair of shears. She stopped in front of a small sickly looking Inuit girl. I knew the girl must be of the Copper Inuit from Victoria Island, because her parka cover was drawn high at the sides, the front and back hanging low like a beaver’s tail, unlike the Mother Hubbard parkas we wore in the west. The girl shrank under the nun’s glare. Catching a firm hold on one of the girl’s long braids, the nun snipped it off with a clean slice and let it fall to the floor. The girl hid her face in her hands as the second braid was cut.
Inuit: a general term for the Aboriginal peoples—including the Inuvialiut and Copper Inuit—who inhabit the Arctic regions of Canada, Greenland, Russia, and the United States. The term “Inuit” has largely replaced “Eskimo.”
The nun did the same to four other girls, sparing only one older girl and one of the outsiders’ children, who was likely a trapper’s daughter. The sound of the shears severing thick black hair drowned out the howls of the disgraced
girls.
At last, only I remained. I held my breath. I was large for my age. Surely she would pass over me.
She did not. She stopped directly in front of me. I stepped back from her heavy cross, which nearly struck me in the face, but she reached out and yanked me back by one braid.
“I can fix my own hair,” I protested in Inuvialuktun, but she held tight and, with the same motion a bird makes to pull a piece of flesh from a fish, clamped the jaws of the shears down on my braid and severed it. I was horrified. I wasn’t a baby. My other braid fell to the floor to meet the first, and I joined the others in their weeping.
There we stood, sobbing in the humiliation of our discarded hair.
A tall Gwich’in girl in a uniform came into the room. She gave a comforting look to one of the weeping girls, who I knew to also be Gwich’in by the wraparound moccasins she wore. My mother had warned me about the Gwich’in. They were not like us Inuvialuit and did not get along with our people. The uniformed girl looked at me. A thin, malicious smile crinkled her lips.
I wished they would cut her hair, too.
She was joined by three other braided girls in uniforms. One of the nuns said something to them that I did not understand. They marched out the door and returned, moments later, with their arms full. I looked for Agnes among them, as they scurried between us passing out the impractical clothes that we were to wear. They had us exchange our warm, comfortable kamik and moccasins for outsider-shoes, and issued each of us a short-sleeved blouse and two pinafores, one navy blue and one khaki. But the worst were the scratchy canvas bloomers. They expected us to wear underwear made out of the same stuff that tents were made with. They knew nothing of living in the North, nor how to dress for it.
The hook-nosed nun shrieked something. I had no idea what she was saying. She held her bony finger out, pointing it directly at me. The floorboards of the dormitory groaned, and I held my breath, scared of what might come next. From a distance, a familiar voice whispered, “Change into the new clothes.”
I turned, and there was Agnes. She had come in and joined the other uniformed girls. One of the nuns hurried over to her, a harsh rasp flying from her mouth. I felt bad that Agnes had gotten into trouble for speaking to me, but I was glad she was there. I gave her a hint of a smile and began to dress.
I hated my new clothes. I was much larger than the other girls my age, and the clothes did not fit well. The shoes pinched my feet. The bottoms were hard and stiff. They did not form to the shape of my foot like I was used to, and there was no padding inside of them. The faded, black secondhand stockings were as transparent as walrus intestines and much too small. They did not reach to the elastic bottoms of my bloomers, so I had no way of holding them up. It was a good thing my mother had bought me my own stockings. I reached into my bag and pulled them out, but the nun snatched them from me with a scaly claw. I stood up straight, hands on my hips, and let out a huff.
Yup’ik: the Inuit who live in western and central Alaska and at the easternmost point of Russia.
“And who do you think you are?” she asked me in my own language.
“I am Olemaun Pokiak,” I told her, puffing my chest.
“We use our Christian names here. And we speak English.” She narrowed her eyes. “You are Margaret,” she said, switching languages.
She could say what she wanted—I knew what my grandfather had named me. It was Olemaun, the same as his Alaskan-Yup’ik mother, and it meant the hard stone that is used to sharpen an ulu. But I could not tell her, because I did not speak nearly enough English. Nor could I do anything about my clothing, though I knew my knees would play peek-a-boo with the cold when I walked, and my toes would freeze as they poked holes through the ends of my onionskin tights. Why would she not just let me wear my own stockings?
ulu: a knife with a rocker-like blade, traditionally used by Inuit women for tasks such as scraping hides, cutting hair, and preparing food.
The nun scuttled to the wall facing the stalls. With one long bony hand, she picked up a cloth from a shelf that was lined with washbasins and made a circular motion with it in front of her face. She pretended to scrub behind her ears and under her armpits. I didn’t need a lesson on how to wash my face. I already knew how to do that. What I needed was to learn how to read.
After she finished her class on washing, she opened her mouth and let out a squawk. First, the outsider’s daughter took out a tube and a toothbrush from among her belongings. The rest of us did as she did. I placed some paste from the tube on the end of my toothbrush, and stuck it in my mouth. It was worse than a fly’s breakfast. I couldn’t help but gag and spit it out. The raven-like nun called out “Katherine,” and the Gwich’in girl who had smiled when my hair was cut tore the tube from my hand and took it to her. The nun cackled and held the tube up for the other girls to see. The older ones laughed loudly, especially the Gwich’in girl called Katherine. The Gwich’in always thought they were better than us.
A tall slender nun appeared in the doorway. She was pale and seemed to float across the bathroom floor. She turned to the Raven, seeking an explanation for the commotion.
I could hardly take my eyes off her.
The Raven made a gesture from her cheekbone to her jaw, like a man shaving his whiskers. The new girls now laughed, too.
My mother had bought that tube for me. They were not just laughing at me. They were laughing at her. I wanted to tell the nun that it was not funny. My mother could not read. How was she to know that she was buying shaving cream and not toothpaste?
I saw the muscles of the tall nun’s beautiful, long neck tense, but she did not laugh. She glided toward me and pulled a small tube from her pocket.
I am not trying that, I thought. I have had enough of the outsiders’ pastes.
She took a drop from the tube, placed it on her own tongue, and smiled. After rinsing my brush, she put a strip of the paste on it. “Mmm,” she said.
I trusted her smile, so I put it in my mouth. It was cool and refreshing like the mints my father had once bought us at the Hudson’s Bay Company. As I ran the brush across my teeth, I could see the tall nun in the mirror. She looked like a pale swan, long and elegant. Later, Agnes told me that her name was Sister MacQuillan, and that she was in charge of all of the other nuns. She would be the perfect woman to teach me how to read, but reading, as I discovered, would have to wait.
Once we had finished cleaning ourselves, it was time to clean the school. We were separated into groups. I was lucky: I was put into Agnes’s group. We were assigned to clean one of the classrooms. We wiped down the desks, the walls, and the floor with a harsh-smelling liquid that made our eyes water and ate at the skin on our fingers.
After we had dusted, swept, and washed everything, we rubbed wax into the wood floor until it was as smooth and as slick as ice. Agnes and the other girls had fun slipping and sliding around on it, but my stockings were too worn on the bottoms for sliding. I perched myself in one of the small wooden desks to see how it would feel. Letters, like those from Rosie’s books, decorated the walls of the classroom. I stared at them, trying to decipher what they might mean.
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Suddenly, the girls fell silent. I turned to see why. WHAP! A stick came down on the desk I was sitting in. I jumped in my skin. The Raven stood over me, with a look that made it clear she did not approve of me sitting down. I scrambled to my feet. She shoved a dusting cloth in my hand and pointed to the rows and rows of books at the back of the class. The other girls were dismissed to get ready for dinner, but I had to stay.
By the end of my first day, the only books I had touched were the ones I dusted.
I HARDLY SLEPT THAT night. The bed had a rickety frame that creaked every time I took a breath. Each girl’s bed was as loud as mine, and the noise filled the vast space of the large room with a disjointed foreign sound, unlike the sleepy rhythmic breathing of my mother, father, and siblings, with whom I had shared a tent since birth. Sobs also carried through the r
oom. My eiderdown blanket was soft, but I missed the musky smell of furry hides, the comforting aroma of smoke drifting through the air, and the darkness of the tent, even in summer. The thin serge curtain above my bed did little to keep the midnight sun from penetrating the huge room. Gathering the blanket off my assigned bed, I crawled underneath it, squinted my eyes, and imagined that my father’s pipe was glowing in the distance.
They woke us very early the next morning, but my sleep had been almost as brief as the short-lived darkness. By the time the nuns entered the room, clapping their hands fiercely, I was dressed and seated on the edge of my bed. I was not about to let another minute stand between me and my chance to learn. However, all I was about to learn was what was to be done with the smelly buckets I had discovered in the stalls, the night before. We called them honey buckets, but there was nothing sweet about a bucket that was used as a toilet. With extreme care, we hauled them down the stairs and across the school yard, where we dumped them in the river. When we returned, we were set to work cleaning the chicken coop. A long time passed before we were herded back upstairs and given a few minutes to attend to our hygiene. My stomach ached with hunger and my mind ached for knowledge. I could not wait to go to Sister MacQuillan’s class and begin reading.
After we were inspected for cleanliness, we were led in single file into a strange room that separated the boys’ and girls’ dormitories. It was filled with long benches, instead of desks, but there were books placed along them. At last, I would learn to read. Standing at the head of the room was the priest who had taken my parents away the day before. I spotted Sister MacQuillan in the front row, but she did not get up to teach us. Instead, the nuns came around and made us get down on our knees and hang our heads. It seemed like an odd way to learn anything. Agnes saw my confusion and whispered to me in Inuvialuktun, “We are supposed to pray for our souls.”
Fatty Legs Page 2
