news | Monday April 29, 2013

They Called Me Number One Is Now Available!

They Called Me Number One by Xat’sull Chief Bev Sellars is the first full-length memoir to be published out of St. Joseph’s Mission at Williams Lake, BC, in which she tells of three generations of women who attended the school, interweaving the personal histories of her grandmother and her mother with her own. She tells of hunger, forced labour, and physical beatings, often with a leather strap, and also of the demand for conformity in a culturally alien institution where children were confined and denigrated for failure to be White and Roman Catholic.

Beginning at the age of five, Sellars was isolated for two years at Coqualeetza Indian Turberculosis Hospital in Sardis, British Columbia, nearly six hours’ drive from home. The trauma of these experiences has reverberated throughout her life. In this frank and poignant memoir of a highly accomplished First Nations woman, Sellars breaks her silence about the institution’s lasting effects, and eloquently articulates her own path to healing.

They Called Me Number One is now available from Talonbooks.