With the blessing of her late Inuvialuk mother and best friend, Olemaun Margaret Pokiak-Fenton, who attended an Arctic residential school in the 1940s, Christy continues to share stories highlighting the strength and courage of Indigenous children who were forced to be their own heroes. Stories are medicine and Christy is passionate about decolonizing narratives for personal and community healing, and advocates for Reconcili-Action that is mindful of the impacts of how settler enagement affects youth self-identity and elder mental health. Christy is a member of the Yellow Thunder ceremonial family of the Kainai Blackfoot.
These 1 hr sessions explore the young life Olemaun and her time at Residential School through her stories as written in Fatty Legs and A Stranger At Home. Visuals, storytelling, context, and inter-cultural comparisons make up these age-appropriate trauma-informed sessions. Includes an intorduction to decolonized thought, intergeneration effects, and cultural reclamaition.
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Christy Jordan-Fenton Chief Creative Officer, is a lead facilitator and curriculum designer for the Bizzybody team. She is most passionate about working with Indigenous and New Canadians, and fostering leadership capacities in youth and elders, and those facing barriers, and loves to bring a decolonizing approach to the work she does. She facilitates general workforce essentials programs, as well as specialized programs in leadership, tourism and hospitality, virtual tourism and marketing, and entrepreneurship, and is a certified Aboriginals Mastering Entrepreneurship instructor. She studied Peace, War, and Diplomacy at Norwich University/ Military College of VT, a top leadership university in the US, upon serving in the Canadian Infantry during the early days of gender integration in combat arms. She has a master’s diploma from UPEACE in Human Rights and Forced Displacement, holds a diploma in Adult Education from the Canadian College of Educators, and is a certified Rule the Room trainer in Virtual Training Mastery, Curriculum Development, and Adult Education. She is near completion of Guided Pathways: Integrating Essential Skills, and is currently she pursuing her Strategic Life Coaching Practitioner Accreditation through CTAA, and her CTDP designation. Christy is part of the Vital Voices sisterhood of global leaders, having completed a VV Lead 2 year fellowship, as well as participating in the VV Scopeathon (in partnership with J&J). In addition, Christy is best known as the author of four children’s books about the late Inuvialuk elder, Margaret Pokiak-Fenton, and her time at an Indian Residential School, the best known being Fatty Legs. For more than a decade the pair gave over 100 presentations internationally on residential school history and cultural literacy for audiences K-12+ and for the public and facilitated numerous professional development workshops for educators at all levels. She also helped to develop numerous trauma-informed and resiliency-based school curriculums centered around Fatty Legs (and their three other books), for schools across Canada and the US. She has facilitated workshops/ delivered talks for such prestigious organizations as USBBY, IBBY, AKLA, Feria International del Libro la Habana, IRSCL, Amnesty International Canada, BCTF, the TRC, and numerous writers’ festivals and teachers’ conferences. She is a member of the Yellow Thunder Ceremonial family, and is a knowledge keeper with earned ceremonial rights. She is also a cofounder of the non-profit Cultural Learning and Innovation Circle (CLIC).