Award-winning journalist Connie Walker's latest podcast reconnects her with her roots
Stolen Season 2: Surviving St. Michael's starts next week and features a story about Walker's father
An award-winning journalist from Okanese First Nation, east of Regina, is now telling stories even closer to her heart.
Connie Walker, the award-winning Cree journalist and creator of Missing and Murdered: Finding Cleo, now creates podcasts for Gimlet Media and Spotify.
Recently she's taken a focus on the stories of residential school survivors. Walker said her brother Hal Cameron approached her and shared a story about their father, which she had never heard before.
Stolen Season 2: Surviving St. Michael's premieres next week and features a story about Walker's father, Howard Cameron. She recently joined CBC's Sam Maciag for an interview about the coming podcast.
WATCH| Surviving St. Michael's unearths how Connie Walker's family's story fits into Canada's residential school system
The conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
Maciag: What was it like coming home to Saskatchewan to do this story? How was it different from previous visits to just visit family?
Connie Walker: You know I always loved coming home. I've lived away from Saskatchewan for over 20 years now, but it always feels like home. I come home a lot, you know, I'm very close to my family in Okanese, but my dad's family is on Beardy's [and Okemasis Cree Nation], so it has honestly been amazing to get to reconnect with them and visit with them for an extended period.
Any time you come home, it's never long enough, right? There's always people that you didn't get to see this time that you wish you could have spent more time with, something else that you wish you would have done — and to have this dedicated time that I could spend with my family, really, honestly, felt like a gift.
In all of the conversations that we had, we were visiting and sharing and talking and laughing and sometimes crying, but also, it felt like I could feel the generosity in everything that they were sharing with me and how incredibly open they were and generous with me about their own stories, but also my dad's.
It really has meant so much to me.
Since last summer, I’ve been working on a story about my late dad Howard Cameron & his time at the St. Michael’s Indian Residential School. This has been a difficult story to report on but I’m so grateful to my family for helping me tell my dad’s story. 🧡 <a href="https://t.co/PbhDsPUrWC">https://t.co/PbhDsPUrWC</a>
—@connie_walkerSo tell me how this story [about your father] came to light in the first place?
Last May, after the terrible discovery at the Kamloops Indian Residential School in B.C., it seemed like a lot of survivors started coming forward and sharing their stories about what they endured at residential school, many of them for the first time.
It was around that time my brother shared a story about our father, our late father, Howard Cameron that I had never heard before. It was about how when our dad was in the RCMP in the late 1970s, he was on patrol in rural Saskatchewan and he pulled over a vehicle that was swerving on the highway because he suspected the driver was drinking.
When he got to the driver's side window, he recognized the driver as a priest who had abused him at residential school.
He shared this story with my brother, that he beat up the priest that night on the side of the road — and then expected for there to be a complaint or to get into trouble or, you know, maybe even lose his job.
But nothing happened and it ended up becoming this story that he told my brother that I just heard last year for the first time.
When I heard that story about my dad, it made me realize how little I knew about his experience at residential school and how little I knew about what he had endured there at that school, and how it impacted him and how it impacted me in my life.
It made me want to learn more about his experience and to also see if I could try to find the priest who he pulled over that night.
Where did your research take you?
I spent most of my time in the Beardy's and Okemasis First Nation, just outside of Duck Lake, Saskatchewan.
That's where my dad was from and that's where he and all 15 of his siblings lived. They all attended the St. Michael's Indian Residential School. So this podcast is really an in-depth look at this one residential school in Canada.
It's not only to learn about my dad's experience. That's where we start in the podcast.
St. Michael's was in operation for over 100 years in that community, and the impacts in Beardy's and Okemasis — but also surrounding First Nations — has been so vast, and really to get a sense of that we talked to dozens of survivors. From Beardy's but also from surrounding First Nations.
[We] really tired to get a sense of what life was like for the students in that school.
You've talked to a lot of survivors, but I'm curious who else do we hear from in this podcast?
It starts out tightly focused on me and my family, and I have a very large family … getting to talk to a lot of my aunts and uncles, and then getting to talk to their classmates and their contemporaries who were in residential school.
[For] a big part of this podcast, I was really trying to find the priest who my dad pulled over that night, the priest who abused him at residential school.
I think also, [we] explored people who were alleged abusers at residential school, what happened to them? Really trying to uncover that part of the story as well, and ask questions about accountability, and ask questions about what options have there been for survivors who are seeking justice and accountability.
With files from Sam Maciag