Indigenous journalist Connie Walker won a Peabody Award and a Pulitzer Prize for Stolen, a podcast about the abuse her father suffered as a boy attending St. Michael’s Indian Residential School in Duck Lake, Saskatchewan. Despite a successful career shedding light on Indigenous issues, it’s still an uphill battle to convince decision makers that Indigenous stories are well worth telling.
True crime podcasts typically aim to solve a mystery by finding an ending, by uncovering new evidence or pointing a finger at the likely killer, like a campfire story meant to thrill and frighten. Indigenous stories, too, are often reduced to their tragic endings: a brutal death, a haunting absence. But Walker goes in the other direction, by showing who a person was before they became a statistic, emphasizing the complexity and humanity of her subjects while avoiding the genre’s tendency to sensationalize the most lurid details of their deaths.
Having won the two biggest awards in North American journalism and cultivated a massive audience, Walker appeared to have unstoppable career momentum as she prepared for the release of Stolen’s third season. But her story took an unexpected twist: in December 2023, Spotify, which had bought Gimlet in 2019, confirmed that the show had been axed (season three will still air). Walker, whose success represented a beacon of hope for despairing journalists, was now a symbol of the profession’s alarming, inescapable collapse. And it illuminated another mystery too, this one about the industry itself: If executives don’t see the value in a show as popular and critically acclaimed as Stolen or Missing & Murdered, what will it take to convince them that these stories are worth telling?
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