Exposing the Truth: Journalism's Role in Reconciliation

Connie Walker has devoted the past decade of her investigative journalism career to exposing the truth about the impacts of residential schools, and helping Indigenous people tell their own stories.

“We’ve all been touched by this legacy, our lives have been shaped and impacted by our parents’ experiences in the schools but we haven’t really learned or understood the truth about what they went through,” says Walker, who is from the Okanese First Nation in Saskatchewan. “We need to, as journalists, help amplify people’s voices and use the power that we have to pass the microphone so that people can share their own stories.”

Walker is the host of Stolen: The Search for Jermain, a new podcast with Gimlet Media about the disappearance of Jermain Charlo and the ongoing crisis of violence facing Indigenous women and girls. A journalist with CBC for 20 years, Walker previously hosted the CBC News award-winning podcast Missing & Murdered. The first season concentrated on the unsolved murder of Alberta Williams in 1989 along the Highway of Tears in BC. Season two, Finding Cleo, focused on finding the truth behind the life and death of Cleopatra Nicotine Semaganis, a Cree child who was removed from her family as part of the Sixties Scoop. She is currently investigating a story about the St. Michael's residential school in Duck Lake, Saskatchewan.

Watch her keynote talk: 

To learn more about Walker, check out this news story.