Today is the National Day for Truth and Reconciliation. Kids are heading to school in orange shirts, and plenty of friends in federally regulated jobs have the day off. The history of orange shirts comes from Phyllis Webstad, who had a new one taken from her on her first day at residential school. Orange Shirt Day began in 2013; the federal holiday followed in 2021. I was living abroad when much of that groundwork was laid, and none of it was in the history we learned in public school.
It is good to see the next generation learning it early. This is a history that should never have been brushed aside, and it’s a true black mark on the formation of this country. We, as settlers have an obligation learn from the past.
It also feels like the right day to write about the podcast that has been keeping me company lately, though “company” is the wrong word for something like this.
Stolen: Surviving St. Michael’s is the second season of Connie Walker’s investigative series from Spotify’s Gimlet Media. Walker, a former CBC journalist and a member of the Okanese First Nation, sets out to understand her father’s past. He was an RCMP officer in rural Saskatchewan, and before that, a student at St. Michael’s residential school in Duck Lake. What starts as reporting on her father becomes an investigation into her own family, and into what the school did to the people who survived it.
What makes it so affecting is that Walker never gets to stand outside the story. Each episode turns the lens a little further inward, and this is what makes it so brave. You get the sense she is learning things alongside you, and deciding in real time how much to say out loud.
In the first episode you learn that Walker’s mother left her father when Connie was seven, and that she has been back to the town where she was born only a handful of times. Her brother now lives in their father’s house, on a road that carries the family name. You would assume it honours her father. It actually honours his sister, who also served in the RCMP. This family tradition seems wild to me after their family history with authority and governing. Walker barely remembers the house. When she visits, her brother is out harvesting medicines, gathering sweetgrass the way generations before him did.
Later, Walker sits down with her godparents, and the conversation goes somewhere you don’t expect. They laugh. They laugh about the tempers that came out, about how alcohol sat at the centre of so much of what went wrong in their families, about stories that would sound harrowing to anyone outside the room. They tell them lightly, the way people do when they have had decades to find a way to carry something. It is funny, and then it isn’t, the listener is left holding both sides.
It is careful journalism as much as it is memoir. Walker has credited her colleague Betty Ann Adam, a member of the Fond du Lac Denesuline Nation, for the care she took with survivors, and Chantelle Bellrichard for unearthing thousands of pages of documents. You can hear that care. Survivors are given time. Nobody is hurried toward a conclusion.
It is turbulent listening. There are episodes you will want to pause, and probably should. What stays with you is that Walker chose to share her family’s story anyway, knowing how painful it would be to tell. In 2023 the series won the Pulitzer Prize for audio reporting and a Peabody Award within about a day of each other. Walker’s response at the time was simple: “Our stories do matter.”
They do! What lingers is how far this one spreads. Walker’s father is one man, but the harm moves outward through families: into how children are raised, what gets talked about at the dinner table, what goes unsaid for generations. No Indigenous families in this country were left untouched by the system, and the series makes one of these stories real.
Wearing an orange shirt is one way to mark today, and spending a few hours with the Connie Walker is another. You come away understanding more of what was taken, and more of what was never theirs to take.