"Stolen: Surviving St. Michaels" Podcast Takes On Canada's Indian Residential Schools

 Award-winning investigative journalist Connie Walker is definitely on a roll.

Last week,  Stolen: The Search for Jermain, the Gimlet/Spotify podcast won a CLUE Award last week in Las Vegas.

This week, Gimlet / Spotify announced that Connie Walker is back with an all new Spotify-Gimlet podcast, “Stolen: Surviving St. Michaels,” premiering May 17. For the first time in her 20-year investigative career, Connie is tackling an Indigenous issue through the lens of her own family’s experience.  

 

 

Check out the trailer here.

 

In “Stolen: Surviving St. Michaels,” Connie Walker unearths how her own family’s story fits into one of Canada’s darkest chapters: the residential school system. The traumatic legacy of Canada’s Indian Residential Schools came to light in both U.S. and Canada national media last year when the remains of 215 children were uncovered on the grounds of Canada’s Kamloops Indian Residential School.

 

After discovering a disheartening story about her father last year, Connie decided to dig deeper into her father’s past, uncovering the horrors her father experienced in a residential school that impacted their relationship later on in life. 

 

 One night back in the late 1970s, while he was working as an officer in the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, her father pulled over a suspected drunk driver. He walked up to the vehicle and came face-to-face with a ghost from his past—a residential school priest. What happened on the road that night set in motion an investigation that would send Connie deep into her own past, trying to uncover the secrets of her family and the legacy of trauma passed down through the generations.

 

Over the course of the podcast, Walker grapples with the generational trauma Indigenous communities all over North America continue to face from these schools, while searching for that reconciliation she’s yearned for with her father after so long.

 

Known for her reporting on missing and murdered Indigenous women through hit podcasts like “Missing & Murdered: Finding Cleo” and last year’s “Stolen: The Search for Jermain,” Connie for the first time is sharing a more personal story on an Indigenous topic she’s not investigated. 

 

Connie Walker will also be doing a panel at the Tribeca Festival in NYC on June 19 that explores trauma-informed reporting and the intersection of narrative journalism and true crime.

Connie Walker has been a journalist focused on the plight of women and Indigenous people for several years. She started her career at CBC in Canada, where she was an award-winning investigative reporter. 

In 2016, Walker created “Missing & Murdered,” a CBC podcast that captivated listeners around the world and was downloaded more than 30 million times. “Missing & Murdered: Finding Cleo” was featured in The New York Times, The Rolling Stone, The Columbia Journalism Review and won the inaugural Best Serialized Story award at the Third Coast International Audio Festival in 2018. Walker is Cree from Okanese First Nation in Canada.

  “Stolen: Surviving St. Michaels,” will be released on May 17th.