Canadian Journalism and Professional Recognition

Connie Walker and Spotify's Gimlet Media team won the prize for best audio journalism. Their podcast, "Stolen: Surviving St. Michael's", won the most influential award for journalism in the English language.

"I feel like I'm still in shock. It's disbelief. It means so much. It's an incredible honour," Walker told the media right after the award winners and nominees were announced.

The prize was awarded for "investigation into her father’s troubled past revealed a larger story of abuse of hundreds of Indigenous children at an Indian residential school in Canada, including other members of Walker’s extended family, a personal search for answers expertly blended with rigorous investigative reporting."

Connie Walker graduated in journalism from the Saskatchewan Indian Federated College and passed an internship at CBC Newsworld, where she began her career. She now works for Gimlet Media in New York City. After this professional recognition of her merits, she will have opportunities to pursue even more ambitious projects.

The fact that Walker is a member of the Okaneze First Nation, in Southern Saskatchewan is extremely important in this story. In an interview, she said that "it's important to acknowledge the history and stories of Indigenous people and to have those stories told by Indigenous people themselves."

""Our stories do matter and I think of all of the people bravely shared these stories with us. People should know these stories. More people will hear them now," said the Pulitzer laureate.

Stolen: Surviving St. Michael's is a deeply human exploration of the nation's boarding school system. Connie was prompted to investigate by a story about her late father that she had never heard of before.

"One night back in the late 1970s while he was working as an officer in the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, he pulled over a suspected drunk driver. He walked up to the vehicle and came face-to-face with a ghost from his past — a residential school priest. What happened on the road that night set in motion an investigation that would send Connie deep into her own past, trying to uncover the secrets of her family and the legacy of trauma passed down through the generations," was how the Pulitzer committee described her work.

Remarkably, the new Pulitzer Prize winner has the same name Walker as the 1982 winner for fiction. Then, in the very early 1980s, Alice Walker's "The Color Purple" broke the glass ceiling, telling the story of an African-American woman, brilliantly later played by actress Whoopi Goldberg in Steven Spielberg's "The Color Purple".

As then, current laureate Connie Walker has allowed those whose voices were previously unheard to grow stronger and to be heard by tens of thousands who care about those who near.

Winning in this nomination Connie Walker will receive $15,000 USD in prize money.