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 addition, beginning at the age of five, Sellars was isolated for two years at Coqualeetza Indian Turberculosis Hospital in Sardis, British Columbia, nearly six hours’ drive from home. The trauma of these experiences has reverberated throughout her life.
The first full-length memoir to be published out of St. Joseph’s Mission at Williams Lake, BC, Sellars tells of three generations of women who attended the school, interweaving the 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.
Like Native children forced by law to attend schools across Canada and the United States, Sellars and other students of St. Joseph’s Mission were allowed home only for two months in the summer and for two weeks at Christmas. The rest of the year they lived, worked, and studied at the school. St. Joseph’s mission is the site of the controversial and well-publicized sex-related offences of Bishop Hubert O’Connor, which took place during Sellars’s student days, between 1962 and 1967, when O’Connor was the school principal. After the school’s closure, those who had been forced to attend came from surrounding reserves and smashed windows, tore doors and cabinets from the wall, and broke anything that could be broken. Overnight their anger turned a site of shameful memory into a pile of rubble.
In this frank and poignant memoir, Sellars breaks her silence about the institution’s lasting effects, and eloquently articulates her own path to healing.
Event Details
Meet and Greet:
Tuesday, March 04, 2014
7:00 – 8:00 pm
Book Discussion:
Tuesday, March 25, 2014
7:00 – 9:00 pm
Location:
Cecil Green Park House – Map (http://goo.gl/maps/oRYFB)
University of British Columbia
6251 Cecil Green Park Road
Vancouver, B.C.
Cost:
$10 per person. Light refreshments will be served.
RSVP Online
Please RSVP online before Friday, February 25th, 2014. For more information, please contact Karolin Konig at 604-822-8939 or at karolin.konig@ubc.ca.
Please Note: Books will not be provided so please make arrangements to obtain a copy to read before the Book Discussion. Books are available at the UBC Book Store (www.bookstore.ubc.ca/home).
Sign up for your ACard and benefit from a 12% discount at the UBC Book Store. For more information on obtaining an ACard please visit (www.alumni.ubc.ca/services/acard/).
Parking: There is a limited amount of meter parking in the lot on Cecil Green Park Road, the closest parkade is the Rose Garden Parkade (for entry after 5:00 pm and on weekends, a flat rate of $6.00 applies).
Facilitator
Renée Saklikar, BA’85, LLB’90, Author
Educated at the University of British Columbia (B.A., LL.B) and a graduate of Simon Fraser University’s The Writer’s Studio, Renée Sarojini Saklikar writes thecanadaproject, a life-long poem chronicle. Born in Poona/Pune, India, Renée has lived in provinces across Canada, coast to coast. Work from thecanadaproject appears in literary journals and newspapers, including The Vancouver Review, The Georgia Straight, Geist, SubTerrain, Poetry is Dead, CV2, and Arc Poetry Magazine and in the recent anthologies, Alive at the Center, Contemporary Poems from the Pacific Northwest, and Force Field, 77 Women Poets of British Columbia. Renée’s elegiac sequence, children of air india, un/authorized exhibits and interjections, is published by Nightwood Editions (2013) and is the first book length poetic examination of the bombing of Air India Flight 182 to be published in Canada. Renée serves as a mentor for SFU’s Southbank Writers Program and is the co-founder of a new poetry reading series, Lunch Poems at SFU.
http://thecanadaproject.wordpress.com
Twitter: @reneesarojini