Starting in February each year’s selection is featured in Ontario’s libraries on posters and in literacy activities targeting First Nations readers and budding writers. Inspired by the success of CBC’s annual Canada Reads literature competition, FNCR encourages family literacy, intergenerational storytelling and information sharing, and highlights work involving the participation of First Nation, Métis, or Inuit creators, says program coordinator Patty Lawlor. That’s largely the reason the first Jordan-Fenton/Pokiak-Fenton collaboration, Fatty Legs, has the qualifier A True Story in its title.Ī moving account of Pokiak-Fenton’s experiences as an 8-year-old in a Catholic residential school in Aklavik, a fur-trading settlement in the far north-eastern corner of the Northwest Territories, Fatty Legs has transcended its children’s literature status since its publication in 2010, and taken on residual value as inspiring evidence of the wealth of stories and writing talent in the under-represented literary culture of First Nations people.Īmong many accolades, prizes and nominations that have distinguished Fatty Legs is its selection as the recommended title in the 2011-2012 First Nation Communities Read initiative, an annual reading program launched in 2003 by the First Nations public library community under the auspices of the Southern Ontario Library Service. “She has quite an imagination, and I didn’t want my grandchildren thinking less of me because my name is on a story that isn’t true.” “I told Christy that if we did this, it would have to be the truth,” Pokiak-Fenton says on the phone from her home in north-eastern B.C. John-based leather and beading artist and mother of eight hesitated. When Christy Jordan-Fenton first suggested writing down some of the stories her mother-in-law, Margaret Pokiak-Fenton, had been telling for years around the family table - about living a nomadic existence in First Nations communities in Canada’s remote northern regions on the edge of the Arctic Ocean, hunting, trapping and trading with dogsleds and massive ice schooners - the Holman Island-born, Fort St.

Author of fatty legs