ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
FOREWORD – Hemas Kla-Lee-Lee-Kla
INTRODUCTION
What Pain Have You Suffered?
Chapter 1
My Grandmother
First Memories
My Grandfather (xp’e7e)
Grasshoppers Looking For Work
Radios, Dances, Electricity And Running Water
Uncle Leonard
My Brother Ray Was Born in Prison
Sardis Hospital = Loneliness
Chapter 2
St. Joseph’s Mission = Prison
Families Separated
Duties At The Mission
The Food They Gave Us You Wouldn’t Give Your Dog
I’d Rather Kiss a Dog Than an Indian
Chapter 3
I Get Religion But What Did It Mean?
Sexual Abuse
Mental Abuse – A Lifelong Sentence
Forbidden Languages
Chapter 4
Health Care?
Uncle Ernie
Teachers
Gangs and Acceptable Touching
Boot Camp Style Supervision
Letters and Visitors Were Screened by the Authorities
Chapter 5
Pain and Pleasure
Some Good Memories
The Puffed Wheat Bandits and Other Runaways
Chapter 6
Home Sweet Home
Christmas
The Shame of Puberty
The RCMP, Priests, Indian Nurses and Indian Agents
The Training I Received to Be a Productive Part of Society
Chapter 7
The Summer of ’67 - Big Changes in My Life
Going to School With Whites and The Cache Creek Motors Bus
White People Can Be Stupid?
Living With Dysfunction
Family Chaos
Leaving the Safety of Gram’s House
My Epiphany at Sixteen
My Dark Years
Grooming for Violence
Chapter 8
My Attempted Suicide and Other Attempts
Jacinda, Scott and Tony Mack, My Saviors
Stepping Off the Rez
Deaths From Car Accidents
Finally – An Education
The Turning Points: Ernie Phillip and a 25 Cent Book
Chapter 9
Becoming a "Leader"
Cariboo-Chilcotin Justice Inquiry
Examining the Aftermath of the Residential Schools
Anger
Hemas Kla-Lee-Lee-Kla
Chapter 10
Indians – An Industry With No Product
Don’t Ever Think I Don’t Miss You, Bev
Institutions and Aboriginal People
A.I.M. and Other Political Teachings
Going to University
Final Thoughts … for Now
Publicity and promotion in conjunction with the author's speaking engagements Promotion on the Talon's website (www.talonbooks.com) Advertising in B.C. Bookworld, Quill & Quire, Library Journal
Bev Sellars is a former Chief and Councillor of the Xat’sull (Soda Creek) First Nation in Williams Lake, British Columbia. First elected chief of Xat’sull in 1987, a position she held from 1987-1993 and then from 2009-2015. She also worked as a community advisor for the BC Treaty Commission. Ms. Sellars served as the representative for the Secwepemc communities on the Cariboo Chilcotin Justice Inquiry in the early 1990s. Ms. Sellars has spoken out on racism and residential schools and on the environmental and social threats of mineral resources exploitation in her region.
Ms. Sellars is the author of They Called Me Number One, a memoir of her childhood experience in the Indian residential school system and its effects on three generations of women in her family, published in 2013 by Talon Books. The book won the 2014 George Ryga Award for Social Awareness, was shortlisted for the 2014 Hubert Evans Non-Fiction, and was a finalist for the 2014 Burt Award for First Nations, Métis and Inuit Literature. Her book, Price Paid: The Fight for First Nations Survival, published in 2016 by Talon Books, looks at the history of Indigenous rights in Canada from an Indigenous perspective. Sellars has a degree in history from the University of Victoria and a law degree from the University of British Columbia. She is currently Chair of First Nations Women Advocating Responsible Mining (FNWARM) and serves as a Senior Advisor to the Indigenous Leadership Initiative (www.ilinationhood.ca).
The Cruelest School
In Canada, few subjects are as emotionally and politically charged
as the former residential school system and the legacy it left
behind. From the 1870s until the 1990s, more than 150,000 First
Nations children were separated from their families and placed in
government-funded, church-run schools, a policy that caused deep
and lasting damage not only to people but also to an entire
society. Much of what has been written about the residential
schools system, however, is so densely academic or historical that
many readers simply tune it out. But Bev Sellars’ memoir, They
Called Me Number One, is neither, which is what makes it so
accessible. Torn from her family at the tender age of seven — as
was required by law in the early 1960s — Sellars was enrolled at
St. Joseph’s Mission School in Williams Lake, B.C., where she is
now the chief of the Xat’sull First Nation. Although the school was
just 40 kilometres away from her family home, “it might have been a
million.” Sellars calls it her prison, and that’s hardly hyperbole.
Her belongings were confiscated, she was given a number to replace
her name and she performed manual labour. Failure of any stripe was
met with shaming and physical punishment — a leather strap on the
palm of the hand, or a ruler rapped across the knuckles. Then there
was the sexual abuse, which Sellars and some of her classmates
endured at the hands of the clergy that ran the school. Yet as
harrowing as Sellars’ experience was, They Called Me Number One is
not an especially depressing read. Her tales of life at St.
Joseph’s can even be uplifting. She would steal glances at
discarded newspapers for news of family members, and throw tea
parties with her friends on Sunday afternoons. After being denied
permission to use the restroom during prayer, a friend helped her
conceal a pants-wetting accident from the nuns. It’s stories such
as these that are a testament to the strength of spirit that people
can summon in even the most trying circumstances. There is already
a wealth of writing that critiques the flaws in Canada’s historical
and contemporary relationships with its Aboriginal Peoples (Sellars
herself steers clear of drawing overtly political conclusions until
the book’s final chapters), but the human stories of those who
suffered have been harder to find. Sellars’ intensely personal
memoir changes that.
In this full-length memoir, Bev Sellars weaves her family history
together with her experiences growing up in the interior of British
Columbia in the 1950s and ’60s. Sellars recounts in an uninhibited
voice some of the formative events of her youth: her twenty-month
stay at the Coqualeetza Indian Hospital in Sardis and, centrally,
her attendance of St. Joseph’s Indian Residential School near
Williams Lake in the 1960s. Although a large portion of the memoir
is focused on St. Joseph’s, a few chapters are devoted to telling
the story of the author’s healing journey post-residential school:
attending university, developing her political awareness, and
becoming a leader in her own community. Throughout, Sellars
succeeds at invoking a powerful sense of respect and admiration for
her parents, grandparents, siblings, and relatives who have endured
much pain in their lives as a result of the residential schools and
official and unofficial racism. Her grandchildren grace the cover
of the book, and it is to them and all those families who
experienced the residential schools in Canada, the U.S., and
Australia, who she dedicates her work.Sellars’s memoir is a welcome
addition to the expanding genre of published works that feature
native peoples’ histories and testimonies of Indian Residential
Schools. In recent years, works by Agnes Jack, Agnes Grant, Terry
Glavin, and Celia Haig-Brown have sought to put native peoples’
experiences of residential schools front and centre in a broader
effort toward political and economic justice in British Columbia
and Canada. These works have complemented the national Truth and
Reconciliation Commission’s mandate to promote understanding and
reconciliation between native and non-native peoples through the
gathering of testimony from residential school survivors. Sellars’s
memoir offers a unique contribution to this effort by showing how
the inculcation of obedience to white authority in Residential
Schools has hindered aboriginal peoples’ efforts to articulate
their political grievances. She remembers vividly how students who
disobeyed white authority figures at St. Joseph’s in the slightest
of ways (such as sitting back on one’s heels when praying for long
periods of time) were subject to cruel and excessive beatings.
Students learned to be like “little robots” and developed a servile
and passive attitude towards the schools’ white authority figures.
Sellars reveals that for many years post-residential school, she
could never contradict, correct or otherwise stand up to a white
person, even in times when these actions would have been entirely
appropriate. Sellars’s story is a testament to how the schools were
a calculated attempt to politically pacify native peoples. The
memoir manages to weave these complex political themes into an
emotional and highly personal narrative of suffering, pain, loss,
and ultimately individual and communal overcoming. Sellars is a
talented storyteller – in each chapter she skilfully layers on her
recollections, gradually building toward a moment where she
delivers a final memory or insight in a laconic and impactful
fashion that seems to sum everything up perfectly. These
emotionally charged moments in the narrative are arresting: the
kind that make you fall out of the book momentarily in a need to
digest, reflect, and feel the impact of what Sellars and her family
have experienced. One chapter ends with Sellars recalling how after
leaving residential school she was “scared of closed areas, and
elevators especially freaked me out. I was scared of heights and
being alone. Migraine headaches were a constant companion. I
enjoyed the feeling of being hungry and at one point was very
skinny, even borderline anorexic. In a nutshell, I was emotionally
and socially crippled in my ability to deal with the world.” This
honest and blunt delivery characterizes the entire memoir. They
Called Me Number One is an intimate, heartbreaking, and ultimately
hopeful act of truth telling about residential schools in Canada.
Aboriginal people who have attended the schools will identify with
Sellars’s experiences and find inspiration in her ability to face
the pain and suffering instilled in her rather than numb it.
Non-aboriginal readers, if they open their hearts and minds, will
be transformed by the life experiences and powerful narrative voice
of Bev Sellars.
"They Called Me Number One is from my perspective necessary reading
across the generations. Over the past quarter century, I have been
asked many times by students and others to recommend a book that
speaks honestly and straightforwardly to the residential school
experience in British Columbia and in Canada more generally. My
long-time choice of Shirley Sterling’s My Name Is Seepeetza,
written from the perspective of a child, now has a fine counterpart
in Bev Sellars’s They Called Me Number One, crafted with the wisdom
of hindsight." - Jean Barman
"They Called Me Number One is from my perspective necessary reading
across the generations." - Jean Barman
 |
Ask a Question About this Product More... |
|
