Books like They Called Me Number One by Bev Sellars
In "They Called Me Number One," Bev Sellars shares her experiences as a Shuswap child at St. Joseph’s Mission in Williams Lake, B.C. The book details the harsh reality of residential schooling—limited home visits, forced labor, and the pervasive abuse of the era, including the sex-related offences committed by principal Bishop Hubert O’Connor between 1962 and 1967. Sellars provides a personal account of the school's violent legacy, the community’s reaction after its closure, and her own journey toward healing and remembrance.
First publish date: 2013
Genre: Biography & Autobiography/Autobiography
Authors: Bev Sellars
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Books similar to They Called Me Number One (14 similar books)
Junior, a budding cartoonist from the Spokane Indian Reservation, transfers to an all‑white farm‑town high school, where the only other Indian is the school mascot.
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In a world where global warming has erased dreaming, a group of Indigenous teens discover their bone marrow—and the dreams it contains—hold the key to salvation, while hunters pursue them to harvest that cure.
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Saul, a young Ojibwa boy, is separated from his family, sent to a brutal off‑reservation boarding school, and finds only hockey as a path to redemption amid racism and trauma.
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A historical examination of government inquiries into the conditions at the Williams Lake Indian residential school in British Columbia, focusing on the tragic deaths of two Shuswap boys in 1902 and 1920.
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The Education of Augie Merasty is a candid memoir by a retired fisherman and trapper who survived Canada’s residential school system, detailing abuse, cultural loss, and his journey toward healing.
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Wab Kinew’s memoir chronicles his journey of reconnecting with his Anishinaabe father, shedding a self‑destructive past and embracing music, martial arts, and Indigenous activism.
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An account of life at the Garnier Residential School for Indian Boys, detailing the education, social conditions and experiences of Ojibwa and other North American Indians in Canada.
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Established in 1884 and operative for nearly a century, the Chilocco Indian School in Oklahoma was one of a series of off-reservation boarding schools intended to assimilate American Indian children into mainstream American life. Latterday critics have characterized the schools as destroyers of Indian communities and cultures, but the reality K. Tsianina Lomawaima discloses was much more complex. "Indian people took possession of Chilocco and made it their own," she writes. "Their voices should tell its history." In recollections juxtaposed against the official records of racist ideology and repressive practice, students from the 1920s and '30s recall their loneliness and demoralization but also remember with pride the love and mutual support binding them together, their creative rebellions against petty authority, the forging of new pan-Indian identities and reinforcement of old tribal ones, the skills and trades they mastered, and the leadership they developed.
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The last "Indian war" was fought against Native American children in the dormitories and classrooms of government boarding schools. Only by removing Indian children from their homes for extended periods of time, policymakers reasoned, could white "civilization" take root while childhood memories of "savagism" gradually faded to the point of extinction. In the words of one official, "Kill the Indian and save the man.".
Education for Extinction offers the first comprehensive account of this dispiriting effort. Much more than a study of federal Indian policy, this book vividly details the day-to-day experiences of Indian youths living in a "total institution" designed to reconstruct them both psychologically and culturally.
Based upon extensive use of government archives, Indian and teacher autobiographies, and school newspapers, it is essential reading for anyone interested in Western history, Native American studies, American race relations, educational history, or multi-culturalism.
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Some Other Similar Books
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Dispossessed: A Chronicle of the Dispossessed by Lynn Jones
Race and Resistance: Literature, Politics, and the U.S. South by Darcy C. Wooten
Ghosts by Shirt by R. O. Kwon
My Heart Is a Wide Shape by Beverly Tattau
The Inconvenient Indian: A Curious Account of Native People in North America by Thomas King
Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants by Robin Wall Kimmerer
A Mind Spread Out on the Ground by Alice Elliott Dark
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