I #amreading . . .

Xat'sull Chief Bev Sellars spent her childhood in a church-run residential school whose aim it was to "civilize" Native children through Christian teachings, forced separation from family and culture, and discipline.

In the first full-length memoir to be published out of St. Joseph Mission at Williams Lake, British Columbia, Xat'sull Chief Bev Sellars tells of three generations of women who attended the school, interweaving personal histories of her grandmother and her mother with her own. She tells of hunger, forced labour, and physical beatings, often with a leather strap, and also of the demand for conformity in a culturally alien institution where children were confined and denigrated for failure to be White and Roman Catholic. Sellars breaks her silence about the institutions lasting effects and eloquently articulates her own path to healing.