"They Called Me Number One: Secrets and Survival in an Indian Residential School" by Bev Sellars

 {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.