Saskatchewan Cree journalist Connie Walker won both a Pulitzer Prize and a Peabody Award this week.Connie Walker/The Canadian Press
Saskatchewan Cree journalist Connie Walker has won two of the biggest prizes for journalism in North America for her podcast exploring the abuse that went on at the residential school her father once attended.
Stolen: Surviving St. Michael’s won both a Pulitzer Prize for audio reporting and a Peabody Award for podcast and radio this week. It’s the first podcast series to win both accolades in the same year, and Walker is a rare Canadian to be honoured by the U.S.-based awards.
Walker, who is from Okanese First Nation in Saskatchewan, said her mind went blank when she heard the news.
“It took me more than a few seconds to even just process the words that I was hearing,” she told The Globe and Mail. “It’s just so incredible, and just so overwhelming and so amazing. It just feels like such a blur. And I almost can’t even believe that this is really happening.”
Stolen is produced by Spotify’s podcasting company Gimlet. Walker said the podcast began as a story about her father, who was a survivor of St. Michaels, and herself. She said she wanted to understand how his “experiences at a residential school affected the father that he was to me.”
The Roman Catholic-run school, in Duck Lake, Sask., closed in 1996. Walker said her idea soon expanded to attempt to tell the stories of all of St. Michael’s survivors. She and her team spoke with 28 people who attended the institution, and exposed more than 200 allegations of sexual abuse between 1931 and 1988.
“I think that you could tell a story like Surviving St. Michael’s about every single residential school in Canada,” Walker said. “The window for telling these stories is shrinking and the window for accountability is shrinking, but it’s not too late.”
Walker said that she is thinking about all the times in her career when she’s been told that stories on Indigenous people and issues weren’t important.
“These two huge wins, to me, feel like proof that, of course, Indigenous stories matter, and Indigenous voices matter.”
Walker first became interested in a journalism career as a high-school student, after an Indigenous woman named Pamela George was killed in Saskatchewan in 1995. Recalling the news coverage of George’s death, she said “it felt like more time and affection and care was given to the two men who were charged in her death, than to Pamela.”
“As a young First Nations woman growing up in Saskatchewan, I remember how that made me feel,” Walker said. “I remember what it made me feel about how our stories are treated, and wondering if there were any Indigenous journalists who were covering that story.”
She wrote an editorial about it for her high-school’s newsletter.
More than two decades later, the Pulitzer Prize winner said that she and her team – two others of whom are Indigenous – hope these awards mean that more people will hear the stories of residential school survivors.
The first season of Stolen launched in 2021; it investigates the story of a young Indigenous woman called Jermain Charlo, who went missing in Missoula, Mo. On Tuesday, Spotify announced that the podcast will return for a third season, in which Walker will investigate the case of two missing women from Navajo Nation in the United States. It’s set to run in the fall.
It’s rare that Canadian journalists win Pulitzer Prizes for their work. Paul Watson won one in 1994 for spot news photography with The Toronto Star. Barbara Davidson has been awarded multiple Pulitzers, including one for breaking news photography in 2006 with the Dallas Morning News and another for feature photography in 2011 with the Los Angeles Times. Susanne Craig won one for explanatory reporting with The New York Times in 2019.