From the Frozen North: When I was Eight &
Not My Girl

When I was Eight

The back cover of When I was Eight explains that this story, along with Not My Girl, is Jordan-Fenton and Pokiak-Fenton's attempt at distilling Fatty Legs and A Stranger at Home into a format "accessible to young children." The title page of both When I was Eight and Not My Girl are done in a collage style, with a photograph (of the school in Aklavik inWhen I was Eight and of Margaret-Olemaun with her family in Not My Girl) overlaid with snowflakes by Grimard, a personal detail that might help children understand that these stories are true.

In When I was Eight we learn that although Margaret-Olemaun's father did not want her to go to school because "he knew things about the school that [she] did not" (second opening). Though no details are shared beyond this to warn Margaret-Olemaun about what she might face in school, she is given plenty of warning in Fatty Legs. Her sister, recently returned from school, shares details with Margaret-Olemaun about how at the nuns at the residential school take more than "just your hair, Olemaun. They take everything," while her father "rarely spoke of the school and would never tell me of the wonderful things I could learn there" (Jordan-Fenton, 2020, p. 6). Despite these warnings, Margaret-Olemaun insists on going to school so she can learn to read the outsider's books. Learning to read like her sister Rosie was her greatest wish. However, she soon finds that the "unrealistic picture" she's conjured about school will soon be shattered by a "dose of reality" (Clifford & Kalyanpur, 2011, p. 7) when she realizes the school demands that she "give up a part of [herself]" (Clifford & Kalyanpur, 2011, p. 9) in order to achieve the school's goal of assimilation.

Margaret-Olemaun's story of removal was voluntary, not forced. Thus, perhaps, the shock of the cruelty at the schools was even greater for her than for children who had been torn away from their families. Like Larry Loyie experienced in As Long as the Rivers Flow, Margaret-Olemaun recounts in being burdened with chores to clean the school and dormitories in When I was Eight, as well as going to church to "clean our souls," neither of which helped her get "closer to being able to read" (fourth opening). Education was often so neglected that it's clear the main objective of these schools was to destroy cultural connections, not to educate or elevate.

In addition to abuses suffered at the hands of teachers, nuns, and caretakers, the children were often cruel to one another (perhaps displacing their own fear, pain, and anger towards each other). In the fifth opening of When I was Eight, we see Margaret-Olemaun isolated from the rest of the girls, who are pointing and laughing at her, showing how alone she is at school. Nevertheless, Margaret-Olemaun persists in studying everything she can in order to learn to read.

When she is locked in the cellar as a punishment (ninth opening), we see Margaret-Olemaun coping by connecting with her past, her home, and culture, by working to "feel [her] father's presence (he is shown as a simple outline, wrapping her in his embrace), while also reaching into her future, her dreams of goodness, by spelling out "things from home" in English letters (which also dance around her in the darkness of the cellar). She is using “both Western and traditional knowledge” to take “ownership of [her] future based on the resilience of [her] past” (Vandever, 2017, acknowledgement).

Another act of defiance is found at the eleventh opening when Margaret-Olemaun burns her stockings; the accompanying illustration shows her looming above a tiny pot, emphasizing how big she feels, and the red background is obscured, hinting that while she had been so angry about her stockings and her cruel mistreatment, she felt better having done something about it.

When I was Eight ends without Margaret-Olemaun ever returning home, a rather open—and unsettling—ending given what she shared with us about how miserable she was at the school. In Fatty Legs, we learn that due to an unseasonably cool summer, she wasn't able to return home after spending a year at the school because boats couldn't travel between her island and her school. Instead she had to spend the summer working at the school and endure a second school year before going home. She spent a (nearly) blissful year at home, but then because "the government made school attendance a condition for receiving child benefits," her father decided that her younger siblings must also go to school, so she "reluctantly, went with them," in spite of knowing what she knew, so that she could help them cope while away at school (Jordan-Fenton, 2020, pp. 83–84).

Not My Girl

Not My Girl recounts Margaret-Olemaun's rocky homecoming experience. In the second opening she talks about her mother's seeming rejection because "the long braids she had once lovingly plaited had been cut away, along with everything she remembered of me." Two years away at the residential school, where she had been forbidden from speaking her own language had caused her to forget "the words in my own languge to tell my mother that I was her girl" (Jordan-Fenton, 2014, second opening). While she is shown reaching toward her mother, the gutter of the spread divides the two. They are not sure how to get to know each other again. Margaret-Olemaun's father is the more empathetic parent in this scenario—we see him embracing Margaret-Olemaun in the next spread—because, having been to residential school himself, he understand the feeling of being disconnected from one's own community and can also speak English with her while she works on relearning her culture and language.

At the final opening, we see Margaret-Olemaun and her mother embracing. Margaret-Olemaun has relearned much of her culture and her mother has accepted the changes in Maragaret-Olemaun, assuring her that she is "My girl!" Reading both these stories together will show the full "removal-school-home" cycle (Harde, 2020, n.p.) and will give younger readers a sense of closure not found by reading When I was Eight alone.

Further reading about Margaret-Olemaun Pokiak-Fenton:

Fatty Legs shares the the story of When I was Eight in greater narrative detail, including a brief description of Margaret-Olemaun's trip back home after her first two years at residential school, so it completes the full "removal-school-home" cycle discussed by Harde (2020). It does not, however, give full details about the challenges Margaret-Olemaun faces when she returns to her community. That part of her story can be found in A Stranger a Home, which tells about how children may have come "home to the place of their people, but they still had a great distance to cover before they could return to a place of belonging" (Jordan-Fenton, 2011, p. 108). The experience of being shunned by a community you trusted would welcome you home added salt to the wounds of abuse these children suffered at residential school. And while "some children...fought hard to reclaim their place among their people, ...others learned to cope within the margins of their communities" or "left to find work in the outside world" (Jordan-Fenton, 2011, p. 108–109).

At the end of A Stranger at Home, rather than going home, Margaret-Olemaun is repeats the "removal-school-home" cycle, this time with her sisters. Margaret vowed to "teach [her] sisters to walk each day of their lives...as if they always belonged, no matter where they were" (Jordan-Fenton, 2011, p. 104) and did her best to give them a sense of security and love while at residential school.

While these texts may not be appropriate for younger grades, I suggest that any educator planning on teaching When I was Eight and/or Not My Girl read them for a greater depth of understand of the topic. These books, while not picturebooks, would also be perfectly acceptable to use in a middle grade classroom. The narrative is these two middle-grade novels discusses difficult aspects of residential schools in more depth than the picturebooks do, but still treads delicately around the hardest aspects.

Works cited:

Clifford, E. J., & Kalyanpur, M. (2011). Immigrant Narratives: Power, Difference, and Representation in Young-Adult Novels with Immigrant Protagonists. International Journal of Multicultural Education, 13(1), Article 1. https://doi.org/10.18251/ijme.v13i1.358

Harde, R. (2020). Talking Back to History in Indigenous Picturebooks. International Research in Children’s Literature, 13(2), 274–288. https://doi.org/10.3366/ircl.2020.0358

Vandever, D. W. (2017). Fall in Line, Holden! Salina Bookshelf Inc.