At ten she finally travels to be reunited with her family in the Arctic she can hardly contain her anticipation. She endures all kinds of humiliation at the hands of the nuns but learns a lot more than reading in English. This story begins at the end of the two grueling years when Margaret was forced to stay at the boarding school and not able to see her family. Margaret vows never to come back once she goes home.Ī Stranger At Home: A True Story is a sequel and continues the childhood memories of Margaret Pokiak. Due to an especially strong winter, the students cannot visit their families at the end of the year and are forced to endure another year within the suffocating school walls. Margaret and others are prisoners in the school and miss their free lifestyle. The nuns also intercept the letters that students write home to ensure that nothing negative about the school is sent home. These tasks are new and distasteful to the students from the Arctic, but they have to do it anyways because their families are far away. They are forced to work in the fields and throw away buckets of refuse. There is no learning to read at the beginning of the school year, instead the students are taught to clean themselves and their surroundings. Sister MacQuillan is the opposite of Raven and steps in when life is unbearable for Margaret. Raven gives her red stockings when she has a perfectly fine pair of grays (a school color), making Margaret the laughingstock of the entire school, and she burns the stockings. Raven humiliates her at every turn and finds insignificant reasons to poke fun at Margaret. The nun, in turn, immediately dislikes the strong-willed Margaret. Her encounters with a teacher known as the Raven, a black-cloaked nun with a hooked nose and bony fingers that resemble claws, immediately puts Raven on the defensive. Margaret soon learns that her free spirit and love for learning are challenged at every turn in her new life. Margaret has an older sister who has been to this school but her sister’s stories of the terrors and pressures of the school are ignored by Margaret and she convinces her father to send her there.

Despite the long trip, the missionaries come looking for the children and force them to attend their school.

The nuns look and act differently from most of Arctic nomads and the school is far from where they live. The problem is that missionary Christians run the only school teaching English. At eight she wants to go to school and learn how to read in English. Written by Christy Jordan-Fenton and Margaret Pokiak-Fentonīeginning with Fatty Legs: A True Story, these two books comprise the story of young Margaret Pokiak growing up in the high Arctic during the early twentieth century.

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