Chief Bev Sellars is winner of the 2014 George Ryga Award for Social Awareness for her book “They Called Me Number One: Secrets and Survival at an Indian Residential School”

At age five, Bev Sellars was isolated for two years at the Coqualeetza Indian Turberculosis Hospital in Sardis, British Columbia, nearly six hours’ drive from home. She later endured far-worse isolation from her family for ten months each year in the notorious St. Joseph’s Residential School in Williams Lake where both her grandmother and mother had been incarcerated before her. Sellars was forced to attend the Catholic-run school in the 1960s when the principal was Hubert O’Connor. As Bishop O’Connor, he was convicted in 1996 of committing rape and indecent assault on two young aboriginal women during his time as a priest at St. Joseph’s.

Soon after we arrived at residential school, we were given a number that would become our identity. I became Number 1 on the girls’ side. Although the other kids all continued to call me by name, ‘Bev Sellars’ ceased to exist for most of the nuns, priests and staff. Instead they would say, ‘Number 1, come here’ or ‘I want these girls in my office; Numbers 1, 14, 72 and 105’ or ‘Number 1, say the second decade of the rosary.’  — Bev Sellars, in They Called Me Number One

Bev Sellar’s memoir They Called Me Number One: Secrets and Survival at an Indian Residential School describes St. Joseph’s and O’Connor, as well as the hunger, forced labour and beatings with a leather strap that were common in the school. Her lifelong path towards healing has culminated in the first book to be written by someone who survived St. Joseph’s school.

In this frank and poignant memoir, Sellars breaks her silence about the institution’s lasting effects, and eloquently articulates her own path to healing. Bev Sellars is chief of the Xat’sull (Soda Creek) First Nation in Williams Lake, British Columbia. She was first elected chief in 1987 and has spoken out on behalf of her community on racism and residential schools and on the environmental and social threats of mineral resource exploitation in her region.

Initiated by The George Ryga Society, BC BookWorld and Okanagan College, the annual Ryga Award has been presented since 2003 by Okanagan College to a B.C. writer who has achieved an outstanding degree of social awareness in a new book published in the preceding calendar year. Bev Sellars won the award in 2014.

People First Radio presenter Nancy McInnes speaks with Bev Sellars, in an interview first broadcast in March 2014.

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Bev Sellars presents her memoir to Canada’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission, making it part of the public archive (September 2013)