YOUR FEDER ATION - ANNUAL MEE TING 2025


SOCIAL JUSTICE SPEAKER JOURNALIST CONNIE WALKER


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ulitzer Prize and Peabody Award– winning journalist Connie Walker, a member of the Okanese First Nation


in Saskatchewan, addressed ETFO delegates about how she found her way to reporting and producing the award-winning podcast Stolen, which exposed decades of systemic abuse in the St. Michael’s Indian Residential School in Duck Lake, Saskatchewan. Walker began by speaking about her


own school and teachers. “I still remember every single elementary school teacher that I had. Te work you do is so important to every kid in your classroom,” she said. “I want to thank you.” In 2015, Walker covered the release of the


Truth and Reconciliation Commission’s final report, in which Justice Murray Sinclair stat- ed that, “Tere’s not a single Indigenous per-


40 ETFO VOICE | FALL 2025


son in Canada who has not been touched by the legacy of residential schools.” “I believed him, but I didn’t quite un-


derstand it,” said Walker, who described that moment as one of the hardest days in her career. It wasn’t until she was in university that she began connecting the legacy of residential schools to her family. Interviewing her grandfather for an oral history project, Walker learned that he had been sent to residential school at six years old and had not been allowed to go to his grandfather’s funeral. “So much of my journalism has been


filling in the gaps of the truth of residential schools and Canada’s colonial history,” said Walker. “Te truth of these schools is need- ed if we’re ever going to heal.... As a Cree woman I am honoured to do this work.”


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