Connie Walker on how lived experience can help Indigenous journalists expose truth

*Originally published on January 7, 2022. 

Connie Walker has been a journalist for over two decades. She has witnessed how Indigenous stories have been "grossly underrepresented, sometimes misrepresented and generally misunderstood."

The Pulitzer Prize-winning Cree journalist from the Okanese First Nation in Saskatchewan spent most of her career working at CBC, dedicating the last eight years to exclusively focusing on reporting on Indigenous issues. She was the host of the highly acclaimed podcast series Missing and Murdered and is currently the host of U.S.-based podcast series Stolen: The Search for Jermain.

Walker deeply believes Indigenous stories need to be told by Indigenous journalists because she says "the stakes are too high when journalism fails in their representations of Indigenous people. It can cause incredible harm and leave lasting damage."

"Indigenous journalists need to be leading this work. They must be supported, resourced and empowered, and it will be worth it because we bring with us a unique set of lived experiences and perspectives that are crucial for understanding the realities that Indigenous people live in Canada, and how that connects back to aspects of our shared history that Canadians are just beginning to understand," Walker said in her lecture entitled Exposing the Truth: Journalism's Role in Reconciliation, as part of 7th annual Indigenous Speaker Series Lecture at Vancouver Island University in Nanaimo, B.C., in November.

After her lecture, host Nahlah Ayed spoke with Connie Walker about how lived experience as a journalist helps to uncover the truth.

NA: I want to start by talking about your early experiences. You have said in the past many times that you feel that it's your responsibility to tell Indigenous stories. And earlier in your lecture, you talked eloquently about the impact of the story of Pamela George. Take us to the moment, not when you noticed that story, but when you decided to take on the responsibility of lending your voice, or providing the voice, or telling the stories that are not told in the media.   

CW: I think that when I learnt about Pamela George, that was the first time I thought about becoming a journalist. But I think the early experiences I had actually discouraged me and made me think that I shouldn't take on that work. And actually, I feel like I was actively discouraged in taking on stories about Indigenous people for a big part of my career and by people who I think were well-intentioned and well-meaning and who really believed that it would pigeonhole me.

For a big part of my career, I felt like I was kind of hanging on by my fingernails. And part of that insecurity is what kind of discouraged me for so long. It wasn't until the work of the TRC [Truth and Reconciliation Commission] and, you know, we could actually see that people were interested, that I was able to get more opportunities. I don't think there was ever a conscious decision, except that once I started taking them on I felt like, 'Yes, this is why I'm doing this. This is why I want to be here.' 

But beyond the interest, as you say, it was demonstrated that people were interested. But did you see an actual impact either in Indigenous communities or beyond?   

Yeah. An example of that is when I was working on 8th Fire. It was a documentary series that we worked on and I remember telling my family about it and they weren't interested. They didn't really care. They're quite supportive, obviously, but not that interested. But then after 8th Fire aired and everybody saw it on social media and everybody was connecting with it online. I remember them being like, 'Oh, that's what you're working on' and they were very excited. 

I think that you can't underestimate how important and vital it is to see yourself in stories, to see yourself in media, to see yourself respected. Because that's what it is. It's a sign of respect when you're given the space to share your story and you're giving your space to talk about what you care about. And I feel like that impact has definitely helped spur me forward. And it's only grown. 

It's very arresting, listening to you, talking about taking on your own story and investigating your own family's history to understand again, providing the context to Connie Walker is all of this a lifelong mission taking on this responsibility? 

I don't know. I have never made a plan about my career or imagined where I would go or what I would want to do. But this definitely feels like the thing I should be doing right now. 

When the discovery was made in Kamloops of unmarked graves of children, I think that seeing it acknowledged and recognized as the truth of what it is, that children died in residential schools and that survivors were telling the truth when they testified at the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, I felt like people felt the weight of that again once, it was acknowledged and people paid attention. And so it was an incredibly emotional time, I think, for so many people. 

But also I think that for me as a storyteller journalist, it really also helped me understand where the conversation was and that for so many people, it was still a revelation that this was the truth and that people were finally ready to acknowledge that truth.

It also was jarring because it wasn't new information for people who are paying attention to the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, there's a part of the final report called Missing Children, and there's a whole section where they talk about the children who died at residential schools. And I think that's when I started being impacted by that, it made me really interested and realized that's what I wanted to be doing. 

There's been a lot of talk about the importance of lived experience in people being able to tell stories and share a truth that they're familiar with. I know you've talked about the difficulty of getting that concept across, but can you just talk some more about that? Just the idea of what it's like to try to get into a business that was for so long — and still is —very concerned about objectivity and about distance from an event and trying to get an idea across of why lived experience actually does matter in telling a story.   

I feel like for so long that was a strike against you, if you were an Indigenous person, there was somehow a feeling that you couldn't objectively tell stories from your own community. And that was something I feel like I had to really be careful of for a big part of my career. I still am very careful about it, to be honest. 

One of the things that I'm grateful is happening right now in journalism are the conversations around objectivity and actually a recognition of how subjective journalism is, and has always been, and that in the decisions that are made by journalists about the stories that they take on and the people that they talk to and the way in which a story is told is incredibly subjective in terms of whoever is the person telling that story. And I think that for so long in Canada, the United States, everywhere that those stories have been told by people who aren't representative of the societies that they're reporting on.  

But it was done by younger journalists. What's the difference do you think between the earlier generation of journalists to today in terms of lived experience and how that fits.

I feel like for me, it's been like a slow recognition. I remember going to a panel talk and having that question from a senior journalist to me about like, how, you know, assuming that I was an advocate because I was native and trying to explain that if I'm an advocate, it's for the truth. It's for the truth about Indigenous people and our perspectives and our stories and how and why that's important and relevant to know. 

Is that distinction important? Does that question come up of 'activist's journalism' so to speak versus objective journalism? How often does that come up in terms of ?  

I don't see that people ask me about it that often, honestly.

I think in doing the work that I've done, I've realized just how important it is, how informed my work is by my lived experiences, by my perspectives, how that shapes every part of the process in terms of how we approach interviews. Because I am somebody who's been affected by trauma in our communities, I'm very sensitive to that when I'm interviewing people — especially who have survived, not just the trauma of losing a loved one but often multiple traumas throughout their lives and trying to take a trauma-informed approach has really been informed by my own experiences. 

I'm realizing how that is actually a benefit to the journalism and a benefit to the story that we can tell and can actually help us get closer to the truth.

*Q&A was edited for clarity and length. This episode was produced by Anne Penman.