CANADA
Winnipeg Free Press
Reviewed by: Michael Dudley
WHEN the First National Conference on Residential Schools convened in 1991 in Vancouver, the opening address was delivered by the Chief of Xat’Sull (Soda Creek) First Nation, Bev Sellars. She described how she and the other children at the residential school at Williams Lake, B.C. were treated “like dirt” by the white priests and nuns, ridiculed, and programmed “like robots” to believe that they belonged “to a weak, defective race.”
For Sellars, this wasn’t an education; it was instead, “training for self-destruction.”
A lawyer who at one time worked with the B.C. Treaty Commission, Sellars here recounts in this frank, angry and defiant memoir the full story of her own dehumanizing programming at the school in the 1960s, and how she narrowly avoided self-destruction herself.
While the tragic history of Canada’s arrogantly racist experiment in cultural genocide has been documented in such major works as J.R. Miller’s Shingwauk’s Vision (1996) and A National Crime by John Milloy (1999), Sellars’ book joins a smaller but growing body of residential school autobiographies such as Basil Johnston’s Indian School Days (1988) and Theodore Fontaine’s Broken Circle (2011).
Note: This is an Abuse Tracker excerpt. Click the title to view the full text of the original article. If the original article is no longer available, see our News Archive.