Connie Walker

Connie Walker is an award-winning Cree investigative journalist. Her body of work has exposed the crisis of violence in Indigenous communities and the devastating impacts of intergenerational trauma stemming from Indian residential schools in Canada and the United States.

​​Walker grew up on the Okanese First Nation in Saskatchewan. While studying journalism at what was then the Saskatchewan Indian Federated College, she was awarded a scholarship to intern at the CBC.

During her two decades at the CBC, Walker co-created the public broadcaster’s Indigenous unit. As its lead reporter, she helped build a database of unsolved cases of missing and murdered Indigenous women and girls. In 2016, CBC published Walker’s podcast Missing and Murdered, examining the 1989 murder of a ​Gitxsan woman. Season two of the podcast focused on the death of a girl who had been removed from her family as part of the Sixties Scoop. The series won several awards including a Canadian Screen Award.

Walker then joined Gimlet Media in 2019, producing the Stolen podcast series. Season two, Stolen: Surviving St. Michael’s, focused on the Indian residential school where her father had been abused. Through the testimonies of survivors, Walker and her team uncovered more than 200 allegations of sexual abuse. The series is considered one of the most comprehensive investigations into a single residential school. It won both a Peabody Award and a Pulitzer Prize.

In 2024, TIME magazine included Connie Walker on its annual list of the 100 most influential people.