Stolen: Surviving St. Michael's Podcast Team Wins 2023 Pulitzer Prize

The Pulitzer Prize is an award administered by Columbia University for achievements in newspaper, magazine, online journalism, literature, and musical composition within the United States. It was established in 1917 by provisions in the will of Joseph Pulitzer, who had made his fortune as a newspaper publisher.

It's not an MTV award or some made-for-TV award. It connotes true excellence and effort. The winner this year demonstrates how far podcasting has come.

The award-winning investigative journalist Connie Walker and the team behind the critically-acclaimed podcast series “Stolen” have won a 2023 Pulitzer Prize in Journalism for Season Two, Stolen: Surviving St. Michael’s, in the Audio Reporting category.

Spotify CEO Daniel Elk tweeted, "Just got news that Stolen Season 2 won a Pulitzer Prize in Audio Reporting. Such an honor! If you haven’t listened - you definitely should. Huge congratulations to Connie Walker and the whole team!"

In the Pulitzer Prize-winning Stolen: Surviving St. Michael’s, Connie Walker turned her reporting to focus on the traumatic legacy of Canada’s Indian Residential Schools. Her months-long investigation into St. Michael’s Residential School through the podcast exposed more than 200 allegations of sexual abuse against priests, nuns, and staff who worked at the school. The textured and layered series, centered on Connie's immediate family, interrogated the cycles of abuse that often start with childhood trauma and offered a path toward healing and hope.

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 Walker shared a more personal story on an Indigenous topic she’s not investigated.

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.

In Season Three of the Stolen series, Connie Walker will take listeners to the Navajo Nation, as she investigates the case of two missing Navajo women and embeds with the police and families searching for them. 

Award-winning investigative journalist Connie Walker is definitely on a roll. Last year, Stolen: The Search for Jermain, the Gimlet/Spotify podcast won a CLUE Award in Las Vegas.

Stolen: The Search for Jermain specifically focused on the case of a missing Indigenous woman, Jermain Charlo, in Montana, who was out one evening at a bar in Missoula and never made it home. Over the course of eight episodes, Walker is on the ground in real time tracking down leads through the dense mountains of the Flathead Reservation, all while examining what it means to be an Indigenous woman in America, as Jermain was.

Stories of missing and murdered Indigenous women in the U.S. have long gone uncovered by mainstream media, and Walker hopes to change that. For added perspective, the statistics on violence against Indigenous women in the U.S. are alarming — according to the Indian Law Resource Center:

Native American women in particular are the victims of murder at over 10 times the national average, according to the Coalition to Stop Violence Against Native Women. Homicides are the No. 3 cause of death for American Indian and Alaska Native girls and women ages 10 to 24, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

In an interview with Spotify’s For the Record about the Pulitzer, Walker said, “Honestly, I’ve been pinching myself over this news. It is such an incredible honor for our work on Surviving St. Michael’s to receive this recognition. It feels like proof that Indigenous stories matter and that Indigenous people should be supported to help tell them.”

Walker continues: “Above all, our team hopes that this means that more people will hear the stories of the survivors who bravely shared their experiences with us and recognize that this is just the beginning in terms of what it means to learn the truth and try to collectively grow and heal from our past.”