Connie Walker, the Pulitzer Prize and Peabody Award-winning journalist of the podcast “Stolen: Surviving St. Michael's,” spoke at Miami University on Monday, Feb. 24, about the impact residential schools had on Indigenous communities and how that directly affected her family and culture.
Walker, who is from Canada and is a member of the Okanese First Nation, was inspired to create “Stolen” to learn more about Canadian residential schools after learning her father was abused by a priest while he was attending one.
Walker, who was not close to her father, found out through a social media post by her brother that her father had a run-in during his shift as a police officer with his old abuser. The post came after discoveries that there were hundreds of remains of children found at the sites of past residential schools.
“[My brother] said that our dad once told him a story about when he was an RCMP officer in rural Saskatchewan in the late 1970s,” Walker said during the talk. “... Hal wrote that our dad beat up the priest at night on the side of the road.”
For decades in Canada, Indigenous children were forced to leave their families and tribal lands and sent to more than 100 residential schools, whose goal was to assimilate them and remove their connection to their Indigenous culture.
The staff of these schools would often physically and sexually abuse students into compliance. In 2008, the Canadian government instituted the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) to document and talk to survivors of residential schools. One of its commissioners was Justice Murray Sinclair, who, upon the final report by the TRC in 2015, spoke to a room full of survivors. What he said stuck with Walker for years.
“When Justice Sinclair said that ‘there's not a single Indigenous person in Canada who has not been touched by the legacy of residential schools,’ I believed him,” Walker said.
Walker began her career as a reporter for the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) and focused on bringing more attention to Indigenous stories that didn’t receive the media attention they deserved.
“It’s really kind of horrifying to think back on those kinds of situations, and the different micro aggressions or straight up racism that I think led to this false belief that our stories weren't important, or that Canadians or Americans or people didn't care, that our history and our truths didn't matter,” Walker said.
Investigative journalism is a large component of Walker’s work and is something she feels is important to holding society accountable.
“[The podcast] really showed me how important the truth is because we're all still living with these effects of residential schools, and our families and communities know the truth,” Walker said.
Walker’s work uncovering the abuse of Indigenous communities is part of the reason why Rosemary Pennington, chair of the Media, Journalism and Film Department, worked to bring her to speak at Miami.
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“I have been teaching Connie's podcast for years now,” Pennington said. “Connie's work is just so important. She's telling these stories that are really difficult to tell, but she does it in a way where she invites everyone to listen.”
Millions of people have streamed Walker’s podcasts which is part of the reason that Talia Tumino, a first-year supply chains operations and management major, wanted to attend the lecture.
“I actually hate podcasts,” Tumino said, “but hers is the only podcast I love because of the way that she tells the stories. The execution of it is done in a really respectful manner, and that's what I love so much about it.”
Walker spoke about her extensive research process when working on “Stolen,” which took many years of looking through archives and interviewing 28 survivors.
For Kara Strass, the director of Miami Tribe Relations at the Myaamia Center, Walker’s dedication to respectfully telling the history of the Indigenous people of Canada was something that she hoped would stick with audience members.
“It takes so much time to uncover all of these historical documents, all of the stories, all of the history,” Strass said. “[People should recognize] how hard it is to tell the stories and how hard it is to distill hundreds of years of history and the impact of boarding school down into even a few episodes of a podcast.”
Despite being proud of the work she had done in bringing the horrors of residential school into public consciousness, Walker was still left with a feeling of anger about the treatment survivors like her father had received.
“This was just one investigation into one residential school, and I'm still, years later, processing what we were able to uncover,” Walker said. “What I'm left with, honestly, is anger.”
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