news | Thursday July 25, 2013

Canadian Geographic on They Called Me Number One

The July/August 2013 issue of Canadian Geographic includes a review by Tyrone Burke of Bev Sellars’s bestselling memoir, They Called Me Number One.

They Called Me Number One, which has been on the B.C. Bestsellers list for 10 weeks (as of last week), is the first full-length memoir to be published out of St. Joseph’s Mission at Williams Lake, B.C., in which Sellars tells of three generations of women who attended the school, interweaving the personal histories of her grandmother and her mother with her own.

Burke concludes just what other readers and reviewers have concluded about the accessible nature of this book: “as harrowing as Sellars’s experience was, They Called Me Number One is not an especially depressing read. … There is already a wealth of writing that critiques the flaws in Canada’s historical and contemporary relationships with its Aboriginal Peoples … but the human stories of those who suffered have been harder to find. Sellars’s intensely personal memoir changes that.”

The book was also recently reviewed in Quill & Quire and by B.C. historians Eric Wright and Jean Barman.