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Biography & Autobiography Native Americans

They Called Me Number One

Secrets and Survival at an Indian Residential School

by (author) Bev Sellars

Publisher
Talonbooks
Initial publish date
Apr 2012
Category
Native Americans, Personal Memoirs, Native American
  • Paperback / softback

    ISBN
    9780889227415
    Publish Date
    Apr 2012
    List Price
    $19.95
  • eBook

    ISBN
    9780889227422
    Publish Date
    Apr 2012
    List Price
    $19.99

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Description

BC Book Prize, Non-Fiction, Bev Sellars, They Called Me Number One (Finalist)
Burt Award for First Nations, Métis, and Inuit Literature: Bev Sellars, They Called Me Number One (Third Prize winner)

Like thousands of Aboriginal children in Canada, and elsewhere in the colonized world, Xatsu'll chief Bev Sellars spent part of her childhood as a student in a church-run residential school.

These institutions endeavored to "civilize" Native children through Christian teachings; forced separation from family, language, and culture; and strict discipline. Perhaps the most symbolically potent strategy used to alienate residential school children was addressing them by assigned numbers only—not by the names with which they knew and understood themselves.

In this frank and poignant memoir of her years at St. Joseph's Mission, Sellars breaks her silence about the residential school's lasting effects on her and her family—from substance abuse to suicide attempts—and eloquently articulates her own path to healing. Number One comes at a time of recognition—by governments and society at large—that only through knowing the truth about these past injustices can we begin to redress them.

About the author

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 to 1993 and then from 2009 to 2015. She also worked as a community advisor for the BC Treaty Commission. Sellars served as the representative for the Secwépemc communities on the Cariboo-Chilcotin Justice Inquiry in the early 1990s. She has spoken out on racism, residential schools, and on the environmental and social threats of mineral resources exploitation in her region.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 Talonbooks. The book won the 2014 George Ryga Award for Social Awareness, was shortlisted for the 2014 Hubert Evans Non-Fiction Prize, 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 Talonbooks, 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 served as Chair of First Nations Women Advocating for Responsible Mining (FNWARM) for four years and is currently serving as a Senior Advisor to the Indigenous Leadership Initiative (www.ilinationhood.ca).

Bev Sellars' profile page

Awards

  • Short-listed, First Nation Communities READ‚ Periodical Marketers of Canada Aboriginal Literature award
  • Short-listed, First Nation Communities READ – Periodical Marketers of Canada Aboriginal Literature award
  • Short-listed, Named one of 15 memoirs by Indigenous writers you need to read CBC Books
  • Short-listed, Hubert Evans Non-Fiction Prize (B.C. Book Prizes)
  • Winner, George Ryga Award for Social Awareness in Literature (2014), Winner
  • Short-listed, Burt Award for First Nations, Métis, and Inuit Literature
  • Unknown, 44 weeks on the B.C. Bestsellers list in 2013 & 2014!

Excerpt: They Called Me Number One: Secrets and Survival at an Indian Residential School (by (author) Bev Sellars)

Introduction

I was seventeen years old; desperate to escape my misery and all I could think of was to die.

I was so young but my life’s experiences had made me feel so worthless. All those years of abuse and putdowns finally caught up to me that night. I was so tired of trying to fit in somewhere, anywhere. A silly incident was the deciding factor. If anything was going to make me take my life, it should have been worse things that had happened in the past, yet that is all it took. At the time, it did not seem so little. That moment meant life or death, and I chose death. There did not seem to be any point to living.

I had taken my Mom’s bottle of sleeping pills away from her earlier that day because she had been drinking and had talked about taking her life. As unhappy as Mom's life was, I still thought she had reasons to live. Now, there I was holding the pills in my hand. I threw them in my mouth and swallowed easily. I lay down in the bedroom and waited to go to sleep. I did not think about people who were worse off than I was. I did not think about the family and friends I would hurt. I just thought about how lost and lonely I felt and how desperately I wanted out of this world, a world that seemed to offer only intense unhappiness. I did not have to wait long before I felt myself going to sleep …

I started writing this book in the early 1990s when our communities first started to explore and deal with the “aftermath” of the Indian residential schools. A close relative heard that I was writing a book and said to me angrily, “I heard you are writing a book. Boy, you better not be writing anything about me!” This reaction changed my mind about making my story public, but I continued putting my thoughts and memories on paper. In 2004 I decided to finish the book, even if it turned out to be only an historical record for my family.

I asked myself, “Is it possible to make other people feel what I once felt and understand the message I am trying to convey? Is it possible to make others realize the damage they are doing to themselves and their loved ones? Is it possible to help others by writing of my experiences, or will it only create tension with my loved ones who have been a part of those experiences? Should my memories stay just memories?”
I have concluded that I had to write this book and share with those who I know are suffering the same experiences as me. In speaking with others who went to the residential schools in other areas of Canada I am amazed at how similar our stories are about the treatment of the children. It is as if the various churches running the schools were all in the same training program on how to run these schools.

My restricted view of the world and the oppressive conditions under which I lived were not the only options for me, although my experiences until then did not reveal otherwise. In writing the book, I have realized that I am still disassembling the restrictive world in which I once lived.

WHAT PAIN HAVE YOU SUFFERED?

In the early 1990s, I went into the local shopping mall in Williams Lake, British Columbia. I noticed a couple of women who were both at St. Joseph’s Mission while I was there. I went over to say hello and our conversation got around to my speaking out about the residential schools. One of the women said to me, “Why do you speak on residential schools? What pain have you suffered in your life that qualifies you to speak on the schools?” I was surprised at her question. I do not remember my response.
How do you measure pain? Some students looked forward to going back to the mission because their homes were so chaotic from all the alcohol in their communities. Unfortunately, some kids did not have a home to go to during our holidays. The woman who asked me the question was one of those whose home was completely broken because of alcoholism. Does that make her suffering more than mine? Or was my pain more because I knew there was something better at home for me than the life and abuses we suffered at the schools? Does the fact that I chose not to become addicted to alcohol or drugs disqualify me from suffering? Or, was my suffering more because I did not live my life in a fog that alcohol and drugs provided? If I chose to live through it, deal with it, feel the full extent of the pain and allow myself to grow emotionally and mentally, does that lessen my suffering?
Others in different countries have been persecuted. The Jewish peoples, the people in Rwanda and Bosnia, the Black people in the United States and others have atrocious stories to tell. Aboriginal people in Canada have a story to tell as well, a story of which most non-Aboriginal people in Canada are unaware. All of this happened in a country that proudly boasts as being one of the best places in the world to live; a supposedly democratic country where the freedoms and cultures of all are protected and respected. It is the greatest place to live for anyone, except for the original inhabitants of this land, the Aboriginal people.
I am angry about the way Aboriginal people have been and still are treated in Canada, but writing this book has allowed me to grow. I realize that complaining about the treatment of our people is justified, but doing something about it is more important. I found that I was not able to do anything to help my family, my community and Aboriginal people in general until I learned to help myself. Despite all of our experiences, it rests within each one of us to live up to our full potential.
I read somewhere that everyone is born with the potential for success, and it is only through life’s experiences that we develop or destroy that potential. For many Aboriginal people, our most vulnerable and impressionable years, our childhood years, were spent at residential schools. Our mental, emotional and spiritual growth was extremely stunted because of the way we were treated there.
You have to tell our story like it is, don’t hold back or make it seem like it wasn’t as bad as it actually was. People have to know and believe what happened to us. That’s what hurts … when people don’t believe what happened.

That is what Charlie Gilbert from the Williams Lake Indian Band (a.k.a. Sugar Cane) said to me when I started speaking out about the residential schools and the damage done to our people. I cannot tell everyone’s story. Others have told me some horrific stories about things that happened at residential schools, including a few potential murders but they are not my stories to tell. I do not have any right to speak on behalf of other people but my personal experience has exposed me to the effects the residential schools and other non-Aboriginal institutions have had on our society and people. I do not speak on behalf of anyone else’s experience unless it crossed with mine, and then I tell the story only from my perspective. The residential school and non-Aboriginal institutions had a drastic effect on me, and I am eminently qualified to speak on that.

Editorial Reviews

As Canadians slowly begin to acknowledge the atrocities of the government-funded, church-operated Indian residential schools of the 19th and 20th centuries, Bev Sellars, Chief of the Xat’sull First Nation in Williams Lake, B.C., feels she has a mission “to make Aboriginal people realize that it is time [they] started living again and not just surviving.” Her memoir provides invaluable insight into the enduring effects of a tragic and shameful part of our collective past, and also helps to begin the process of healing.

They Called Me Number One describes the author’s experiences at St. Joseph’s Mission in the 1960s. Required by Canadian law to attend the residential school, Sellars and her siblings were removed from the care of their beloved maternal grandmother early in their lives: “No one asked our parents or grandparents if they wanted their children to attend the school. Gram always said to Mike, Bobby, and me, ‘I sure hate to send you kids back to the Mission but, if I don’t, they will put me in jail.’”

Sellars recounts numerous instances of severe physical, mental, and emotional abuse at the hands of the Mission’s staff and teachers, which resulted in long-term phobias, nightmares, migraine headaches, anxiety, alcoholism, and a disabling sense of inferiority. No aspect of Sellars’ troubled youth and early adulthood is off limits, including her responsibility for a devastating car accident that claimed her uncle’s life. More than once, she attempted suicide. Not just a jolting account of abuse, racism, and dysfunction, however, Sellars’ story is also one of healing and resurrection. She has abandoned an abusive relationship, earned two degrees, and become a community leader.

They Called Me Number One conveys anger at current and past governments, religious institutions, and a legal establishment that continue to condemn First Nations peoples to lives of fear and deprivation. Calling for the return of control over their resources, economies, and lives, Sellars declares her hopeful mission to help others “deprogram the destructive teachings of the residential schools” and take their rightful place in Canadian society.

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.

"Sellars has given the readers an insight that we needed to hear." - Rabble.ca

"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

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.

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