Bev Sellars, author of They Called Me Number One and Price Paid, is visiting the Okanagan this week as part of the Federation of Post-Secondary Educators Speaker’s Tour.
Sellars gives a talk on indigenous economies and the potential for reconciliation with non-indigenous communities at Vernon’s Okanagan College campus (in the lecture theatre), Monday from 1 to 2:30 p.m.
This event is free and open to the public.
Sellars is a former councillor and chief of the Xat’sull (Soda Creek) First Nation in Williams Lake. First elected chief of Xat’sull in 1987, a position she held from 1987-1993 and then from 2009-2015, she also worked as a community advisor for the B.C. Treaty Commission.
Sellars served as the representative for the Secwepemc communities on the Cariboo Chilcotin Justice Inquiry in the early 1990s. Sellars has spoken out on racism and residential schools and on the environmental and social threats of mineral resources exploitation in her region.
Sellars’ first book, They Called Me Number One, is a memoir of her childhood experience in the Indian residential school system (Talonbooks, 2012). The book won the 2014 George Ryga Award for Social Awareness, was shortlisted for the 2014 Hubert Evans Non-Fiction award, and was a finalist for the 2014 Burt Award for First Nations, Métis and Inuit Literature.
Her book, Price Paid: The Fight for First Nations Survival (Talonbooks, 2016), looks at the history of indigenous rights in Canada from an indigenous perspective.