{This article originally appeared in the July edition of the Anahim-Nimpo Lake Messenger . It was submitted in June 2023.}
There is one book that
everybody in the Cariboo-Chilcotin should read: Bev Sellars’s They Called Me
Number One: Secrets and Survival at an Indian Residential School (Talon
Books: 2013). Most of the events Sellars describes occurred in places you may
have heard of: her home community of Deep Creek, Soda Creek, the St. Joseph’s
Mission, and a certain town called Williams Lake, B.C.
Even more interesting
for me is when these events took
place. Ms. Sellars is only five years older than I am. Her mother, Evelyn, was born in 1925—in the
same year and only a month later than my own mother, also named Evelyn, was
born. When my family moved to Williams
Lake in 1973, we moved into the house at the airport turnoff, eight miles north
of town. At that time, Sellars would have been eighteen and starting her first
job as a teaching aide at Wildwood Elementary School, which was only a mile
away from our home.
She and I had some of
the same teachers at Williams Lake Junior Secondary School: Mr. Poulton for
grade 8 French, Mr. Wiebe for social studies, and a math teacher I would later
have at Columneetza (Mr. Scheck). We had
much in common. If I had met her at the Wildwood store or while walking along
the path that joined Wildwood to the airport, would we have struck up a
conversation? Would that possibly have sparked an awareness of native issues
that I clearly lacked?
It seems doubtful
somehow. She had just had a close call
with a RCMP officer who had tried to lure her into his car (possibly the same one
who allegedly assaulted another girl from a neighbouring community a short time
later). Three or four years earlier, a female relative of hers had been assaulted
close to my house. It was well known that White men were able to rape native
women and get away with it most of the time.
So she would not have been walking alone and striking up conversations
with strangers.
Many native people have
a gift for candour, and you know that every word she says is true, because she
doesn’t hide embarrassing facts about herself—like the time she almost ran down
some white hitch-hikers for giving her the finger. “Father O’Connor, later
Bishop O’Connor, was the only principal ever tried and convicted. Four
principals in a row should have been charged, three of whom became bishops. If
the top people at these institutions were abusing, it is easy to see why the
others were allowed to abuse so freely.”
She doesn’t jump up and
down accusing the school of killing her brother. She is not even certain that
he committed suicide. But you know from
her description of the way Bobby’s head hung after he had been caught by
the RCMP and marched back to the Mission
that his spirit had been broken, and that it was the School that had broken it. She lets the facts speak for themselves.
It was not just the
occasional horror of sexual abuse, but the constant mis-use of corporal
punishment (“In addition to the daily ritual of kids getting the strap for
wetting the bed, hardly a day went by without someone getting the strap for
some other reason.”) One native acquaintance of mine from my high school class
told me that her mother got the strap just for speaking her own language.
But for me the most heart-breaking
parts are when high hopes and expectations were cut short by .dream-killing
systemic racism. Sellars observes that “Good teachers didn’t last long.” She
herself was steered into a vocational program that prevented her from becoming
a nurse. These stories give a hint of what could have been if a modicum of goodwill
and adequate funding had been brought to bear in native education. In the years
following the Second World War, federal governments spent billions on
vote-getting shared cost programs to provide better health and education for
the provinces, while continuing to neglect the very kids they were most
responsible for in their own jurisdiction.
As a teenager, I was
very conscious of the fact that my father only had a grade six education, and
that I belonged to the first generation in our family to graduate high school
and go on to college or university. But there was a far bigger local story
going on. We should have been celebrating the first generation of native
students who were participating in the public schools on a more-or-less equal
footing, and doing something to repair the damage that had been done to the
people who came before them. But instead, it never crossed my mind. I am truly very sorry about that.
