Soon after arrival at residential school, we were assigned a number that would become our identity. I became number 1 on the girls side. Ninety years after she left St. Joseph's Mission, my grandmother still remembers her number was 71. Thankfully, our numbers were not tattooed on our skin. In the first full-length memoir to be published out of St. Joseph's 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 institution's lasting effects and eloquently articulates her own path to healing.