Trigger warning: This episode contains mentions of sexual and physical abuse.
For nearly the past year, Canadian journalist Connie Walker has been working on an investigation into her father’s experience at St. Michael’s Indian Residential School in Canada. The story is told as part of “Stolen: Surviving St. Michael’s,” a series available exclusively on Spotify. Her investigation began when she heard a story about her late father who was a police officer in the 70s. He pulled over a car that was swerving, and when he got to the window, he recognized the driver as a priest who he believed had abused him at residential school. He pulled the priest out of the car and beat him up on the side of the road. Over the years, thousands of students have come forward about their experiences at residential schools. Walker joins WITHpod to discuss the process of telling this deeply personal story of intergenerational trauma, her motivation for bringing issues affecting indigenous people to light and how this dark part of Canada’s past hasn’t been completely reconciled. The Canadian government has apologized and set aside millions in reparations, along with a new child education and welfare system in response to abuse.
Note: This is a rough transcript — please excuse any typos.
Connie Walker: Generations and generations of indigenous kids went through these schools. And along with the cultural genocide that was, you know, deliberate and a goal of the schools, there was often horrific physical and sexual abuse. And so, children, you know, for, up until the 1940s, 1950s, it was actually, you know, law that children – indigenous children attend these schools and families were forced to give their children over to the Indian agent and the RCMP and the priests who came to the door, or they could be put in jail.
Chris Hayes: Hello and welcome to, “Why Is This Happening?” with me, your host, Chris Hayes. You know, a few years ago, the political satirist and comedian, filmmaker, activist Michael Moore, I don’t know how you best characterize the many things he does, he had a one-person show on Broadway that I went to that was very entertaining. And one of the bits he would do in the show was about the difference between Canada and the U.S. And the point of the bit was that everyone in Canada knows everything about the U.S. but no one in the U.S. knows anything about Canada.
And to illustrate this, he would randomly pick two people from the audience, one person from the U.S. and one person from Canada. He would also make sure that the person (LAUGH) from the U.S. was like – from like Harvard or something (LAUGH) or from some fancy school, and the person from Canada was usually just from a random place, he didn’t go to school in the U.S., I mean a random place to Americans.
Then they would go up on stage and he would have a live quiz show for each of them with details about each country, like how many provinces are there in Canada, and the Canadian would know the answer and the American wouldn’t. How many states in America, the Canadian wouldn’t know the answer, the American would know the answer. And will go on (LAUGH) and on like this, like, what’s the name of the – you know, the prime minister and what are the two major parties and blah-blah-blah? And it’s a very funny bit because he could be – he was convinced, he was sure, like the whole setup to the bit was, he wasn’t controlling the people, the audience, he just knew it was the case that there was this like profound asymmetry between what Canadians know about America and what American know about Canadians.
And I bring that up, because there’s a story in Canada that has been playing out over the last several years that has been, I would say, at the kind of periphery of my news consumption, which is a story about the residential school system in Canada, which is an enormous story there, has been kind of front page news there, and is about the legacy of a system of forced schooling of indigenous children in schools where these children were, A, abused quite horribly, and also underwent a process of, I think, the most appropriate term is cultural genocide. I mean it was a program that explicitly existed to drive the Indianness out of them, the indigenousness out of them, their language, their culture, their rituals, their beliefs, and to change them fully into Canadians, you know, non-indigenous people.
Now, I’ve read about the story, part of it. There was a mass grave that was found on the grounds of one of these schools, which was the moment that sort of precipitated an enormous reckoning, the appointment of a Truth and Reconciliation Commission. This has been an unfurling story in Canada. American media coverage has been – there’s been some, there’s some in the New York Times and other places, but it hasn’t been that full.
And it’s – you know, it’s one of those stories where there’s a huge mismatch between like, if you’re a conscientious news consumer, a mismatch between like, “Yes, I know this thing happened and it’s bad, like, if you ask me, like, was that, you know, and the full force of what happened. And, you know, occasionally, you’ll encounter really great reporting that can transcend that gap. I think that’s one of the things that great journalism can do.
And an example of great journalism is this new podcast that I’ve been listening to, which is just exceptional. It’s called, “Stolen: Surviving St. Michael’s”. It’s produced by Gimlet Media, it’s available exclusively on Spotify, and its creator and host is a journalist named Connie Walker, whose own family has an intimate connection to this one particular residential school called St. Michael’s. And she investigates her own personal history, her family’s history with it, and unspools the story of the atrocities, there’s no other word that were committed there.
I have found this podcast incredibly moving and incredibly illuminating. I’d really urge you to check it out. And before I introduce Connie, I just need to note that this episode contains mentions of sexual and physical abuse, you should definitely take care of while listening or if that kind of thing could be triggering for you, and maybe skip this episode. But Connie Walker, host of. “Stolen: Surviving St. Michael’s,” joins me now. It’s great to have you, Connie.
Connie Walker: Thank you for having me, I appreciate it.
(Music)
Chris Hayes: This is an exceptional piece of work. And I was trying to sort of figure out the best way in, in some ways I want to – there are just two things I want to do. I don’t want to spoil anything because there’s some suspense. I almost wanted to just – because I’m in the business of, like, narrative and storytelling, I kind of wanted to start with your open, which is a great open (LAUGH). So, let’s start with the way this opens because I think that’s a good way to help the listeners, and certainly got me. What’s the first moment of this podcast?
Connie Walker: The first moment really takes the listeners back to my home. I’m from rural Saskatchewan, which for Americans who don’t know Canada, is basically just north of North Dakota and Montana, so Canadian Prairies, very flat, very huge sky, it’s beautiful, I love it so much. And we take the listeners back to one night in the late 1970s. And it’s, you know, I think that there are roads that you drive on, that I’m very familiar with, but it can feel like you’re the only person around.
And in the 1970s, my dad was driving on those roads. He was a police officer in rural Saskatchewan, on patrol one night for the Royal Canadian Mounted Police. And he saw a vehicle on one of these roads that was swerving, and he pulled over the car because he thought the driver was drinking. And when he got to the driver’s side window, he realized that he recognized the driver. It was a priest who had abused him when he was a boy at a residential school. And my dad, in his uniform, pulled the priest out of the car and beat him up on the side of the road that night.
And then expected, as the story goes, to get into trouble to get fired, to have something bad happened to him, but nothing happened. The priest never made a complaint and my dad went on with his life and the priest went on with his. And it became a story that my father told. He told, you know, some of his brothers and sisters that it had happened, he told his wife, and he told my brother, who then posted it on Facebook a year ago, and I was just scrolling through Facebook one night, and I read that post about my dad, and, you know, it just was shocking.
Chris Hayes: That becomes the entry point, the sort of liftoff for this project both narratively in the podcast and as a journalistic endeavor. So, I wanted to just – let’s zoom back out and just talk about the macro and sort of give some context, again, to largely, I think, American listeners who don’t really know anything about residential schools, like what were residential schools, where were they, how long did they exist.
Connie Walker: Sure. So, I mean residential schools were created to kind of aid in the colonialism of Canada, right, the colonization of Canada. And they were meant to kind of quell indigenous resistance and assimilate indigenous people into Canadian society. And so, they were these schools that the government created and funded where the goal was forced assimilation, and the idea was that you take indigenous children away from their families and communities, you know, at very young ages, like four or five, six years old, and you forced them to live in these residential schools that were often run by the churches, and most of them run by the Catholic Church, where they learn English and where they’re not allowed to practice their culture or speak their language, and they become assimilated.
And those schools were in operation in Canada for over 100 years, and there were over 100 schools in Canada. So, generations and generations of indigenous kids went through the schools. And along with the cultural genocide that was, you know, deliberate and a goal of the schools, there was often horrific physical and sexual abuse. And so, children, you know, for, up until the 1940s, 1950s, it was actually, you know, law that children – indigenous children attend these schools and families were forced to give their children over to the Indian agent and the RCMP and the priests who came to the door, or they could be put in jail.
And so, my dad was one of those kids, he was actually the third generation in his family to go to the St. Michael’s Indian Residential School in Duck Lake. And he went when he was six years old, and he spoke his language. And when he arrived, he didn’t speak English and they were forced to learn English and beaten if they spoke Cree and forced to live in the school where they were subjected to terrible abuse physically, and where he was sexually abused by a priest at the school.
Chris Hayes: Yeah, I mean there’s so much here. One thing just to emphasize for folks is that there’s sort of two levels of abuse happening, which is that like, even if there was no physical or sexual abuse, even if no nun or priest ever hit the kids, even if they didn’t sexually molest children, as happened at St. Michael’s and I – other schools as well, the entire setup is a monstrosity (LAUGH), like independent (inaudible).
So, there’s these two sort of two levels happening. And on just the policy level, like, this was a compulsory law like someone came to your door. If you’re a parent, a Cree parent and said, “We’re taking your kid now.”
Connie Walker: Yeah, up until – it was law up until, like, I can’t remember the exact date that it’s changed. But even after it changed, there was still plenty of coercion and still, we’ve heard from families and survivors who are alive now that that was their experience. One of the survivors that we talked to for the podcast says he remembers being a kid and the Indian agent and the RCMP officer and the priests coming to take him away from his parents and saying that, “You know, if you don’t let us take him, you’ll go to jail, and I’m now your child’s father, and there are nuns at the school and there will be his mother,” and that’s what his parents faced. And I think like knowing that it was generational as well, like my dad went when he was six years old and his dad went when he was that age, and both of his parents actually, his mom and dad went, and both of their parents went.
Chris Hayes: The same place, the same school?
Connie Walker: The exact same school. It was run by the Oblates of Mary Immaculate, which is a Catholic order of priests, who actually ran 48 of the residential schools across Canada. And his grandfather, my great grandfather was one of the original students at the school in the early 1900s. So, this is like – this becomes this thing that is like, you know, at first, compulsory, at first mandatory for children to go to, and then becomes – you know, because of the terrible harm that came from the schools, becomes almost a form of child welfare at a certain point, and children, you know, by the ‘60s and ‘70s, and ‘80s, that a lot of kids were there because of child welfare reasons as well, like it’s led to these, like, incredible impacts, obviously, on individuals who were children when they lived there, but then families and then communities and the ripple effects are things that we’re still grappling and dealing with today.
Chris Hayes: Yeah, I mean one of the most profound elements of the story you tell is the intergenerational trauma and how that’s passed on and how stories are kept repressed for perfectly understandable reasons, but that that produces its own after effects in people and their behavior and how they – and their sense of self. I want to just, again, zoom in on this because when – this – I found that the podcast so moving, but like I was just telling you before head on, I had to take it in small doses because of parts that are so upsetting.
And I was just thinking about, you know, I have a 10, 8, and 4-year-old. And, you know, my little four-year-old when she started school, she was after the pandemic, so she hadn’t been socialized, right, so we would take her to preschool every day and she would cry at the beginning. And it took a few days, well, longer than I would like, few weeks every day. It was the worst part of my day.
And it would sort of just kill my heart all day, like I would drop her off and I’d had to do that thing you do as a parent or like you’re just saying, “All right, I love you, bye,” because the longer you stay, the worse it’s gonna be. And as I was listening to this, I was like, these kids were two years older than that, like these are tiny little children, and they’re being taken from their family, and their parents are being trapped in a place that they don’t speak the language and they’re beaten if they do. I mean it’s just like it’s real nightmare stuff, like real like darkest, darkest possible nightmare stuff.
Connie Walker: It’s horrifying. It’s really horrifying. And I think that like for me, it may be sound surprising to hear that, like, I didn’t know about my dad’s story, I didn’t know about his experience. I knew that he had gone to a residential school, but I didn’t know where he went or for how long or how old he was, and I didn’t know that he experienced abuse there.
But when I learned that about him, it helped make sense of so much of what I went through as a kid with him. And this journey of, like, basically, you know, the first episode of the podcast kind of lays out our goals, which is like to try to, you know, understand the truth of what that was like for my dad and other survivors who were at the school like to be those little children and to be taken to this big, red brick building that, like, looms over this tiny town in rural Saskatchewan, it’s the biggest building around for miles and miles and miles, and what it was like for them in those schools and trying to get a sense of what it was like for them in the schools, but then also trying to identify and find the priest who abused him and the priest he pulled over, as a way to also understand, like, what kind of justice has there been, what kind of accountability has there been for survivors.
And it’s been this really eye-opening experience. Even though I’m a journalist, I’ve been a journalist for 20 years, I’ve reported on residential schools, but I didn’t know anything about my dad’s experience. And so, because my dad passed away in 2013, you know, I’ve been interviewing his relatives. He was one of 15 kids in his family to go to that school, and most of them went when they were six years old and they all spoke Cree. And talking to my aunts and uncles and sitting across from them and hearing through their voices the way they’re kind of reconstructing the school and reconstructing their experiences, and imagining my dad is that six-year-old boy has just been …
Chris Hayes: Yeah.
Connie Walker: … so incredibly difficult because I had just never connected those dots before.
Chris Hayes: And I have to say, like, there’s very few people, I think, that could tell the story. Like, I just think it’s a really important story to tell, like a profoundly important story to tell, but like even the best, most humane, empathetic and well-intentioned reporter, you couldn’t just send to go report this. And I want to play a little clip just because – and I think you do such an incredible job, I think, obviously, because you’re like skin in the game here. I want to just play this clip of someone that you spoke to. This a St. Michael’s survivor, Eugene Arcand. And he’s just like – he’s telling you basically like he’s, like, take care with this, like this is the most dangerous, powerful thing that you can talk about for us. This is what he had to say.
Eugene Arcand: When I started on this journey, that same person who helped me encouraged me to gain my language. I told him, “I’m going to start working with residential school survivors.” And he said, “(Foreign Language),” he said.” (Foreign Language), which is, “Don’t play with this.” He said to me, “There are still people walking around out there not being able to go home.” And so, I’m very cautious on how I deal with this stuff that I’ve shared with you. That’s our knowledge. That’s ours, it’s what we’ve learned.
Connie Walker: Yes.
Eugene Arcand: And use that in a respectful way. This is what I call mayhem on (inaudible). This is what we have learned. We don’t profit here from it, you know, and take care of it, or we have to pass it down. You know, just in a good way, don’t play with this, you know. And I see people playing with it.
Chris Hayes: That has stuck with me just as an almost indelible, universal implication to journalists, the work we do. But tell me about how that guided you and how you navigated this.
Connie Walker: Well, honestly, like that almost put an end to the podcast really, like after leaving that conversation with Eugene, you know, I really questioned whether I should be doing this, whether this was my story to tell, you know, and if this is something that I shouldn’t be taking on. And, you know, because I think that the part of the context to Eugene’s warning is that, like, you know, for survivors, from their perspective, you know, they grew up in these institutions where they – and Eugene does this incredible job of like really kind of just crystallizing in a single conversation just what it was like for them to be children and to have danger and predators around you and needing to, like, basically – like you enter this school as a defenseless child, but immediately, you need to then, like, find some kind of edge, find some way to survive.
And he kind of – you know, it really just kind of blew me away, like how he was able to help me understand what he and my dad went through in that school. But when they left, you know, they left these schools, they left these institutions, he talks about it like he was leaving prison, like he was like imprisoned for his childhood, and then led out, and led out, you know, into a world where you were essentially gaslit, your experiences were not taken seriously, nobody believed you or understood you, and where you didn’t have the skills you needed to be not just a parent or, you know, a family member, a brother or sister, but just, you know, he talks about, you know, how they were ranked men and women, he says, who just had – didn’t know how to love, didn’t know affection, didn’t know any of these things.
And so, what’s happened, like only recently, like that we’re starting to actually gain some awareness about what these survivors went through, and I think for me, as a journalist, it’s like – it’s also like reckoning and understanding that we have failed like that it’s 2022–
Chris Hayes: Right.
Connie Walker: –and we’re just now learning the truth about this, like survivors have lived their whole lives and have never shared their stories.
Chris Hayes: That’s a huge experience. And again, I want – I don’t want to spoil it. I’m trying to do this in a way that people are gonna wanna listen to conversation and listen to the podcast because I don’t want to, (LAUGH), preempt it, because like, I’m the kind of person, it’s like, “I’ll listen to like a Terry Gross,” or I’m gonna be like, “I don’t need a book, like I got it.” (LAUGH). Okay. I think I have 40 minutes (LAUGH).
Connie Walker: (LAUGH).
Chris Hayes: So, like, I don’t want people to substitute here (LAUGH).
Connie Walker: Yeah.
Chris Hayes: So, I’m trying to sort of be careful about sort of cannibalizing some of it, but it’s like, that was something that haunted me throughout was, as I’m listening to this, I’m thinking like, you know, I’m in the 99th percentile of people that consume the news (LAUGH), right? I do it for a living.
Connie Walker: Yeah.
Chris Hayes: I’m like, “This is all pretty new to me.” And the level of horror that we’re describing here, and when you say it was like prison, I mean it’s prison, like there’s someone that you talk to in that very powerful episode, for which just sort of montage of voices of the survivors who tells a story of, I think it’s their first day or in the first phase where they just run away, and they’re chased by dogs. Like, it’s a child who’s being treated like a convict, like a prison break. And that person realizing when that happens, like, “Oh, I can’t leave. I’m here against (inaudible).” It was a prison for them.
Connie Walker: Yeah, no, it was. And the fact that it’s like it’s taken this long for there to be this understanding and recognition, I think like what Eugene was saying is like that you should feel the weight and the responsibility of that. And that for, you know, the one thing that he says is like, “There’s still people walking around out there who haven’t been able to make it home.”
And I think he’s talking about, you know, the children who died in those schools because there were so many children who died in residential schools, like these were open for 100 years, like in the early 1900s at St. Michael’s. There was an inspector who wrote a report that said that half of the kids who were at the school were dying because of tuberculosis, because of disease, because they had inadequate shelter and food and all of these things. So, like, there are kids who died there.
But I also think he was talking about the people who left the schools, but then who were so impacted by the abuse and trauma that they have lived through in those schools, that they were never able to go home, they were never able to return to their families, to their communities, never able to heal from that trauma and find peace. And that when you’re taking on telling a story like this, like it is the most sensitive and grave and–
Chris Hayes: Yeah.
Connie Walker: –just to feel the weight of that. And it really – you know, it really threw me for a loop having that conversation, and it made me question, you know, if I should continue.
Chris Hayes: Well, because your positionality is really interesting in this, and it’s part of what I think drives us and part of what I think facilitates you doing such a remarkable piece of work here, like, tell us a little bit about yourself because I mean this comes out in the podcast, but like, you’re a little bit one foot in, one foot out, right, like of these worlds, and that is itself complex in you returning to this world. So, tell us how did you grow up?
Connie Walker: Yeah. Well, I grew up on the reserve in Saskatchewan, so both my parents are indigenous. But my dad went to a residential school and my mom didn’t go to a residential school.
Chris Hayes: All right.
Connie Walker: And when I was a kid, you know, when my parents were together and my dad, like so many other survivors really, I think, struggled a lot in the years after he left residential school, and he drank a lot when I was a kid and he was very abusive, and I grew up witnessing that and watching that and being traumatized by that. And it really affected obviously, my life, but it affected my relationship with my dad.
So, when my parents split up when I was seven years old, I didn’t see him for probably another seven years after that, like until I went back to visit, and I was actually going back to visit his brother, who was my godparent, who I had a closer relationship with. And I think that because I had those negative experiences with my dad when I was a kid, you know, I really kind of kept him at a distance for most of my life.
And I didn’t take the time or I hadn’t – I didn’t feel like I had a desire to learn more about his life, even though I felt like I was watching it from afar and seeing how it had changed, like when I went back when I was 14, he had gotten sober and he had a new family and a new wife and he was reconnecting with his culture and spirituality, like everything that they tried to take from him in residential school, and he became like, a really, you know, leader in the community. And I could see all that happening, but I also felt like, you know, my experiences with him as a kid really kind of made me want to stay back. And–
Chris Hayes: Yeah.
Connie Walker: And I think then, you know, when I heard the story then about the fact that he was abused by a priest at the residential school, it just kind of crystallized like my experiences as a kid. I’m like, you know, it made sense, like why he was so angry, and allowed me to have empathy for him in a way that was really difficult before because I remember a really angry, violent man, who I was really almost relieved when my parents split up and I didn’t have to see him anymore.
And having that ability to have empathy for him and the situation that he was in, thinking about him as a little boy going into that school and being defenseless in the way that I was defenseless when I was a kid and witnessing that, you know, it really helped me connect the dots. And I feel like, you know, so much of my work and my journalism, that’s my goal. I’m trying to connect the dots for people. I’m trying to, like, help indigenous people and our voices and our stories be amplified in mainstream media where we’ve been largely ignored, you know, like, it’s really only been in recent years that there’s been any attention on indigenous issues.
Chris Hayes: We’ll be right back after we take this quick break.
I have to say that you do an amazing job like your father’s story comes through with all its sort of profound pathos. But there is a really beautiful redemptive arc. And I know how – it’s very clear how hard your early memories are with him and how difficult and scary of presence he was then. But also that he – I mean, in this really remarkable way, like, kind of heals himself (LAUGH) from, like, an almost incomprehensible level of trauma and kind of has a fresh start with another family, and he is, by all accounts, I mean your brother who features in it, is a really like lovely, attentive and patient father and pleasant–
Connie Walker: Yeah.
Chris Hayes: –person. And part of the theme here is just about trauma. I mean, you know.
Connie Walker: Yeah.
Chris Hayes: And I thought about accounts and people that I’ve known. I’ve known people in my own life who were – you know, whose grandparents or great grandparents were Holocaust survivors, you know, quite a few in my life. And, you know, it’s just a parent (LAUGH). Well, that’s there, that’s present, that hovers that moves generation to generation. And that’s really one of the themes here is just this entire community that’s dealing with this trauma. I guess talk a little bit about that because I’m – you know, I’m rereading (Freud) right now for some project I’m working on.
Connie Walker: For fun (LAUGH).
Chris Hayes: Yeah, for fun (LAUGH), for a book I’m reading actually and, you know, there’s a lot obviously that I’m not (inaudible) by any – in any way, shape, or form. But just like the central insight, right (LAUGH), which is like, you keep stuff inside (LAUGH), you don’t talk about it.
Connie Walker: Yeah.
Chris Hayes: It’s gonna come out somehow.
Connie Walker: Yeah.
Chris Hayes: And it’s gonna lead you towards anger, rage, substance, depression, whatever it is. The only way out is through–
Connie Walker: Yeah.
Chris Hayes: –you know (LAUGH), like, talk about the thing and acknowledge it. And that core insight, I think, really stands the test of time and is part of what’s on – what this project that you’re doing is about, it seems to me.
Connie Walker: I think it – I think that’s exactly – I mean, that’s exactly it, yeah. I mean I think that the realization, and maybe it was also partly the way I learned, like just scrolling through my phone one night and then being–
Chris Hayes: Yeah, seriously.
Connie Walker: –kind of just hit with like a ton of bricks. And I felt like, you know, I tried to ignore it for a while, I tried to, like, put it away and put it aside. And, you know, it was actually also, I think, really important to understand the context in which I learned it, which was, you know, just a few weeks after that discovery was made of the unmarked graves of children, you know, up to 215 kids at this residential school in Kamloops, British Columbia.
And it felt like, you know, people were finally starting to pay attention to survivors who had seemed like had been like waving their hands in the air their whole lives saying like, “This is real, this happened, like, we’ve lived this,” like, you know. And finally, for the first time, it felt like people were stopping and saying, like, “Oh, my gosh, residential schools for real and terrible things happened there.”
And, like – and so it was so intense, I think, intensely emotional for, as even just as an intergenerational survivor, to be watching that unfold and then to read that story about my dad. I definitely felt like, I couldn’t ignore it, like I needed to go through it. And I feel like this is now the fourth podcast that I have done, which has been like a deep dive into a single story about an indigenous family who has either had a loved one who’s missing or murdered, but it’s also a window into a bigger world about indigenous issues. And I feel like those have all been explorations of trauma. And what I’ve been realizing is like I feel like so much of my career has been me trying to better understand trauma.
Chris Hayes: Right (LAUGH). But like, why am I drawn to these stories of, like–
Connie Walker: (LAUGH).
Chris Hayes: –people stole – like indigenous people (LAUGH) stolen and forced to, like (LAUGH), fill in some dark mystery about their past (LAUGH)? Why have I been doing that for years?
Connie Walker: Look, it’s – yeah, it’s amazing. It – you really can avoid a lot of things (LAUGH). I think he’s right about that. At Columbia University, there’s the Dart Center for Trauma and Journalism, and I did a fellowship there a couple of years ago. And it was really like this deep dive into understanding the science of trauma and how it intersects with the work that we do and how to be trauma-informed in your approach.
But also what the biggest take away from me, as somebody who has experienced trauma in my life, was about how to heal from it. And like one of the ways – like one of the only proven ways to actually heal from trauma and PTSD is to tell your story, to tell it in a way where you have agency and you’re empowered, or to help other people tell their story can be a healing thing for them as well.
And I feel like in some ways, that’s what this podcast is for me because, you know, that I’m helping to kind of, you know, tell my family story and shine a spotlight on it and to expose it because I think with trauma, there is this tendency in this kind of deep, deep, deep desire to avoid it, to put it away to, like, not think about it, to not talk about it. But it always pops up, it can never be hidden, and this is the spotlight we’re trying to shine on it.
Chris Hayes: Yeah. And it also, I think, illuminates how perverse the conundrum for survivors before the last few years must have been, which is overcoming your own (LAUGH) feelings of shame, fear, depression, refreshing to be like, “Here’s the worst thing that ever happened to me, world.” Like to come – to get to that point, and then to say that, it’s like, “What, residentials, like, what do you – what?” (LAUGH).
Connie Walker: Yeah.
Chris Hayes: That just off into the ether and not mattering and not – you know, until this kind of seismic mass grave discovery and the cultural and social, political discussion that emanated off that.
Connie Walker: Not just not mattering, like not just being – people were not just indifferent, like there’s still people who deny residential schools and deny the harms that happened there. And survivors, like if there’s been this – I feel like this kind of echo chamber of like people saying, “Can’t you just get over it?” Like, “That was so,” – like, “This idea that has happened so long ago,” and that it was, “Oh, you see the black and white images and you imagine, but that was 100 years ago, and can’t you just get over it? Like, why are you still talking about this?”
Like – and there, you mentioned in the intro, there was like there was a Truth and Reconciliation Commission that was, you know, tasked with trying to record the truth from survivors about their experiences. And these commissioners traveled across the country and held events and heard from thousands of survivors and tried to record the truth about their experiences.
And I remember one of the commissioners being in an event with him, Justice Murray Sinclair, or Senator Murray Sinclair now, and he said – you know, people say, “Why can’t you just get over it?: And he said, “I say, why can’t you remember it? Like do we ask Holocaust survivors to get over the Holocaust? Do we ask veterans to get over World War II?” Like, what is it like – it’s like really kind of confronting the racism that still exists in society–
Chris Hayes: Yeah.
Connie Walker: –that is asking indigenous people to get over the genocide, to get over residential schools, to get over ongoing colonialism and the violence that we continue to face because of it.
Chris Hayes: We’ll be right back after we take this quick break.
I kept thinking about, as I was listening to this – you know, again, I have a 10-year-old, 8-year-old and 4-year-old, so I spent a lot of time on, you know, reading Dickens books, and Roald Dahl is a big hit, right? And, you know, it’s like you read Roald Dahl (LAUGH) and, obviously, his experience is in a different universe than a residential school, but he was a young kid who went away to a school, which, I think, you know, we would call probably abusive and like modern parlance (LAUGH), I think like a lot of those British prep schools, very young kids were like really pretty psychologically brutal places. And this was not like a genocidal institution that was attempting to erase this history, it was just like a really bad. And that became like his life’s work (LAUGH). It’s like working through, like, if you read Matilda and the scene, the Trunchbull, or, you know, that–
Connie Walker: Yeah.
Chris Hayes: Like you just read – you are reading someone working through the trauma of that childhood, you know, in one tiny pocket in a context far less, you know, oppressively monstrous than the residential school. And so, like, I just kept coming back to that of, like, the scope of what was done to these kids–
Connie Walker: Yeah.
Chris Hayes: –and to this culture, you can’t talk about it enough, right–
Connie Walker: Oh, yeah.
Chris Hayes: –to like get through and out of it because it was totalizing. I guess that’s my point, like, you know, it was totalizing, it was a total attempt to destroy the childhoods and the parent-child relationship of an entire people.
Connie Walker: And generations, like generations of families, right, like so my dad and his parents and his grandparents. The way I’ve been trying to learn about my dad’s experience has been to interview his brothers and sisters who are also at the school. And one of my aunties, I didn’t get to talk to her while I was home and then we were – I came back and she wanted to talk to me, wanted to tell me about her experience at St. Michael’s, but she was like, “I’ll just wait till we’re home and I can do it then the next time we come down,” and I said, “Okay.”
But then the Former Prime Minister of Canada, Jean Chrétien, who was Minister of Indian Affairs when a lot of these residential schools were still open, he went on a talk show and he talked about his experience at a boarding school, but in a way that was like minimizing residential schools where he was like, “Yeah, I went to a boarding school, it wasn’t great, but, you know, we just – we did it and, you know, I didn’t like the food and like it was kind of hard.” But like equating his experience in a–
Chris Hayes: Yeah.
Connie Walker: –boarding school with what she had gone through in residential. And she saw that on the news and she was so upset and she called me and she said, “This happened,” like the fact that she’s an elder now, she has lived her whole life living and trying to like get through the trauma that she experienced and then is now still facing the denials from people like that from people whose a former prime minister, who was Minister of Indian Affairs, it’s great that people are learning the truth, it’s great that, like – you know, I mean it’s actually shameful that it’s 2022 and I’m just–
Chris Hayes: Yeah.
Connie Walker: –learning about–
Chris Hayes: Yes.
Connie Walker: –my dad’s experience in this residential school and we’re just uncovering the truth about what happened there. But that doesn’t mean that there is not still like a lot of people out there who want to deny it and who want to minimize the experiences of survivors, and that’s something that they’re still having to contend with.
Chris Hayes: And you talked – I mean the sort of lingering effects for our survivors, I wanna play just this other clip from a survivor named Vincent Daniels, who was also a survivor of sexual abuse at St. Michael’s talking about the legacy of that with this one sort of very, very sort of potent example. Take a listen.
Vincent Daniels: They used to make us go to bed early in the evening when the sun was going down. That’s one of the things I always remember, the sun was just going down and after that, I hated when the sun downs, when the sun was going down, sunset, one of the things I don’t really (inaudible) there, and I always remember that early evening. When the sun’s going down, that’s all I can remember.
Connie Walker: You still don’t like the sunset?
Vincent Daniels: No. That’s what always brings me back to that day, the nights, the evenings in the dormitory.
Chris Hayes: That really stuck with me, like, you’re reminded every night of what happened.
Connie Walker: Every day of your life. But like the sunset is a painful reminder of the abuse you experienced, yeah. Vincent is like – I mean we talked to almost 30 survivors from St. Michael’s in the end to again, like, because there has never been, like, this kind of investigation into St. Michael’s but also into any residential schools, like, I feel like, if you hear survivor stories from many different schools, like you’d get a sense of, obviously, these things were happening in every school.
But to drill down and find out as much as we could about St. Michael’s and what happened there and what was happening to the kids there, we tried to talk to as many survivors as we could, and we talked to 28, and Vincent was one of them. And I just talked to him the other day because I was – you know, I just want to see if he was – he hasn’t listened, he wants to listen, and I wanted to let him know, like, especially Episode 4 is for survivors. I feel like it’s such an education for us and I feel a responsibility to hear the truth that they shared with us.
But for survivors, you know, he’s reminded on a daily basis about what he went through there. And it’s just so it’s devastating like each individual, like, child, each individual story is just incredibly devastating. And it’s almost overwhelming to then imagine, you know, being one of 15 kids who went in a community where everybody went.
Chris Hayes: One of the things that makes this such an effective piece of journalism is that it is embedded in the particulars. So you can see like what we’re talking about, and I’ve – again, I’ve been walking a line throughout here to not do spoilers and to create some narrative tension in the audience members listening now. But let’s talk a little bit about the trajectory you go on. You decide that you’re going to try to report out your dad’s experience, basically.
Connie Walker: Yeah.
Chris Hayes: How does that go?
Connie Walker: Well, it’s still going (LAUGH). You know, I mean we’re actually – I didn’t know it was gonna end up where we’ve ended up, and I won’t give any spoilers. But I think that like, for what I think is also important to me just personally as well is like, is the investigative element in this story, like, that’s something that I, like, personally am finding a way through and a way forward is the investigation to try to find out who was the priest who abused my dad.
And so, you know, interviewing my aunts and uncles getting – you know, in my very first conversation, I heard the name of a priest, who, one of my dad’s brothers accused also of sexual abuse at the school. And then in the next conversation, I heard the name of another priest who was known to be abusive at the school. And then we find out that there were eight priests who were there when my dad was at the school, and we start doing this investigation into the priests and nuns who ran the school and the staff members.
And I think that’s – that is also, like, I think a big – obviously, so important to your survivors and so important to give them the space to tell their stories and to finally like uncover the truth about what they went through. But equally important in that is this idea about accountability and justice and how do survivors move forward and how do they heal without accountability and without justice, like there have been very, very few abusers from residential schools who have ever been charged or convicted for the abuse that happened at the schools because there have been very few investigations into the abuse. It’s not because there has been hasn’t been widespread abuse.
And so, we wanted to, like, you know, try to document as much as we could just like – just how widespread this abuse was at the school. And that’s something that I – when I say, like, it’s still happening, like, we are still finding out new information today. And we actually, like, are inviting people to send us information as well, like these are really difficult stories to report on because they’re historical, because, you know, we hear the name of someone who’s an alleged abuser, but as a journalist, you know, we have to also try to corroborate allegations.
And that’s incredibly difficult when you’re talking about historical crimes, especially in instances where there have not been any convictions, there haven’t been a lot of investigations. And so, you know, this is like a really – it’s been a really difficult story to report on. But what we’ve been able to uncover is, I mean I don’t – there’s not even – it’s just it’s horrifying, like it’s horrifying.
Chris Hayes: You know, I did some reporting from my first book on survivors of Catholic priests’ abuse. So, they’re obviously, again, totally different context, and I wouldn’t like say that like that happening, a kid in Boston is the same as the residential school system, but obviously, being sexually abused by an authority figure is an enormously traumatic violation in any context. And one of the things that you can see in your investigative work is this kind of notion of, like, the open secret, like inside the world, everyone knows. Outside the world, no one knows.
Connie Walker: Yeah.
Chris Hayes: And the gap that can persist between those two worlds for decades, I mean that was part of what that reckoning, you know, around Boston particularly was, right?
Connie Walker: Yeah.
Chris Hayes: Was that there was this gap that had persisted where, like, people knew (LAUGH) on the inside, and the outside world didn’t know, and it took, you know, the globe and reporters and very brave survivors to blow up that gap. But part of what comes through from your reporting is like that gap still there when we’re talking about the residential schools.
Connie Walker: It’s absolutely still there. And I think that, like, that’s part of what people don’t understand. And what I don’t understand is like, why, why that persists, you know, like, because I think you’re absolutely right in terms of, like the survivors who were at that school, like, it’s the whole community, right? It’s like everybody from every family from that community went to the school.
If you go and ask anybody, “Do you know Father Gauthier? Have you heard of Father Duhaime?” People know these priests and nuns and staff members and have stories to tell. And the fact that there has been a Truth and Reconciliation Commission, there has been an Indian residential school settlement where the government compensated survivors for their experiences at residential schools.
And through that settlement, you know, survivors had to go to these hearings and talk about the abuse that they endured as children and name their abusers like – and the government hired private investigators to track down all of these abusers, not to charge them criminally or to launch any kind of investigation, but to invite them to participate in these hearings to ask them, “Would you – do you have a statement that you would like to make?’
And through this, like, they have the names of like over 5,000 people who were named by survivors as being abusers or witnesses to abuse that happened at these schools. And we can’t access that list, none of that has ever been made public, none of that has ever resulted in any kind of criminal investigation–
Chris Hayes: None, zero.
Connie Walker: –unless a survivor, on their own, decided–
Chris Hayes: Right.
Connie Walker: –to go to talk to a police officer. But the fact that, like, survivors went to these hearings that, you know, government lawyers attended, they had their own lawyers, there was an adjudicator who was a lawyer who was deciding whether or not their claim of abuse was credible. So, the government knows exactly how many people were accused of abuse at St. Michael’s. They know exactly how many times individual priests were accused of abuse or nuns or staff members. And none of that is public. None of that has ever been made public. None of that is any information that we can access through those hearings. And that’s part of what I think is just so, you know, as a journalist, something that has just been my motivation. I’m, like, I want to find out exactly–
Chris Hayes: Yeah.
Connie Walker: –how many priests were abusing kids at St. Michael’s, how many nuns were abusing kids at St. Michael’s, and what happened to them, where did they end up, because very few of them are still alive, but some of them are?
Chris Hayes: Well, that’s – I mean that’s the other thing (LAUGH) that, again, in a very different context I learned from my reporting in the Catholic Church in the domestic U.S. is that like, they went to other places, and guess what they did there? I mean there is a reckoning aspect of this and then there is a very immediate protection of children aspect (LAUGH) to it that is, you know, been borne out in other contexts.
Connie Walker: And you see it, right? And as a journalist, I – you know, I – of course, I’m paying attention to the investigation that happened in Boston with the Catholic Church and the investigation that happened in France with the Catholic Church.
Chris Hayes: Yep.
Connie Walker: And the investigations that are happening in other places. And knowing like that, you know, this is also a story in Canada where I feel like we have just scratched the surface, like we are learning more about residential schools and we’re learning about the abuse that went on there and why are we not then learning more about the abusers and what happened to them, like there are still people, most of the people, most of the priests and nuns who were at St. Michael’s when my dad was there have died, but there are some that are still alive.
And that’s part of the podcasts that we – you know, we want to find them, we want to talk to them, we want to ask them questions about their experiences at these schools and about these allegations of abuse. And we want to know what the Oblates of Mary Immaculate and what the Catholic Church have done to protect, you know, minors after because these allegations of abuse, like they started coming – like survivors started coming forward in the 1990s and filing lawsuits and suing the government and suing, you know, the Oblates, who ran the schools and the Catholic Church that ran the schools and the Anglicans around the schools.
And we started accessing some of these documents and finding like, you know, in one of the statements of defense that was filed by the Oblates, you know, they denied that they were in charge of the care of children at the school.
Chris Hayes: What?
Connie Walker: They denied (LAUGH) that they, you know, had any responsibility for the wellbeing of kids at the school, they denied employing the priests who ran the school. And they said, “Even if the abuse that this survivor has alleged is true, it’s not our responsibility, it’s the responsibility of the Canadian government.” And then the Canadian government statement of defense was like, “We deny that we are responsible, it was the Oblates who ran the school.”
Chris Hayes: Oh my God.
Connie Walker: And that was what survivors were dealing with for so many years. But I feel like all of these things, it’s all been sitting there, it’s all been in court documents, it’s all been in survivors in their lives just waiting to be asked like the people in my family, we’re not unique. This is my story and my story with my dad. But we’re not unique. This happened–
Chris Hayes: Yeah.
Connie Walker: –to every family. This was every family’s experience. And I feel so grateful to my family for being so generous in opening up and talking about the things that we never talked about. But also, you know, I think that this story can be told in every indigenous community across Canada and by every survivor’s family, which is horrifying.
Chris Hayes: On that note, I mean this podcast, you know, has a decent reach and I don’t know who will listen to it or to where it will travel or whose ears it might hit. If there are people that that have information to share who lived this or witnessed it at St. Michael’s specifically or at a residential school, is there a way they can reach out to you?
Connie Walker: Yeah, we have actually created an email address so people can get in touch with us directly if they have any information about St. Michael’s Residential School or any of the priests or nuns or staff members, because you’re right, they – you know, they worked at St. Michael’s, but some of them went on to work at other residential schools, some of them went on to work in other indigenous communities. And our email address that we’ve set up is stolen@spotify.com. And so, absolutely anyone who has any information, and it’s been incredible actually just, you know, what we’ve been hearing from people already who are listening to the podcast and who have information.
And as a journalist, at the beginning, I remember of the investigation, me and my producer Alan, we’re like, “We need a whistleblower (LAUGH). We need somebody who is like has access to information and who can send us something because so much of what we want to – what we are wanting to find out we know is out there, we know that the government has, but we can’t access it.” And so, we’re always open and ready for any information.
Chris Hayes: Connie Walker is a journalist and she’s host of “Stolen: Surviving St. Michael’s”. It’s produced by Gimlet Media. It’s available exclusively on Spotify. And I really cannot recommend it highly enough. It’s an exceptional piece of work, and I learned so much from it and I’m really appreciative for you coming on the program today. Thank you, Connie.
Connie Walker: Thank you so much, Chris. I really appreciate you having me.
Chris Hayes: Just a few notes about what you heard today. So, there are obviously a lot of really important and high stakes journalistic questions here, and I want to just be as specific as we can be here. So, we should note that Father Duhaime, one of the priests who Connie mentioned, is deceased, and that Father Gauthier has been found to be credibly accused in an adjudicated process of sexual abuse of 16 children at residential schools.
The Oblates of Mary Immaculate, an order of Catholic priests that ran St. Michael’s confirmed this information with the team from Stolen in response to their reporting. We heard back at why is this happening from the Oblates of Mary Immaculate. Their spokesperson for Father Gauthier received a statement reading in part, “The Oblates of Mary Immaculate are deeply sorry to anyone who has been physically or sexually abused by an oblate and apologize for the role that our order played in the residential school system.” A statement goes on to say, “The Oblates listen to and support any victim or survivor who comes forward, including with a legal investigation of the case for allegations for criminal, any sexual abuse of minors or vulnerable persons by any member, employee, or volunteer of OMI Lacombe Canada. It’s absolutely contrary to the work and witness of the Oblates.”
We should also note that there are some questions that have been raised about the Kamloops site that we mentioned, includes graves of children as radar devices were used to make that discovery. But that said, the gravesite is still being investigated and there are plans for excavation work to continue and we should get a definitive answer on that very, very grisly question at some point.
Once again, my great thanks to Connie Walker, and like I said, I’ve said it now 40 times on this podcast, but really check it out, “Stolen: Surviving St. Michael’s”. And, you know, we’d love to hear your feedback on this whether it’s something that is a story that you did know about or close to in any way or sort of you didn’t know about and learned about because I have – I really have been pretty affected by it, I found.
So, tweet us with the hashtag #WITHpod, email WITHpod@gmail.com. Be sure to follow us on TikTok by searching for WITHpod. “Why is This Happening?” is presented by MSNBC and NBC News, produced by the Doni Holloway, Tiffany Champion and Brendan O’Melia, engineered by Bob Mallory, and features music by Eddie Cooper. You can see more of our work, including a link to Stolen and other things we mentioned here by going to nbcnews.com/whyisthishappening.
Tweet us with the hashtag #WITHpod, email WITHpod@gmail.com. Follow us on TikTok by searching for WITHpod. “Why Is This Happening?” is presented by MSNBC and NBC News, produced by Doni Holloway, Tiffany Champion, Brendan O’Melia, engineered by Bob Mallory and features music by Eddie Cooper. You can see more of our work, including links to things we mentioned here, by going to nbcnews.com/whyisthishappening.