2023 duPont Winner Connie Walker Launches Urgent New Initiative

By Sophie McDougall, 2026-27 duPont Fellow

2023 duPont-Columbia Award and Pulitzer Prize winner Connie Walker is launching an urgent new initiative, starting with a conversation Wednesday, Sept. 30th: the Indian Residential School Records Project.

This comes four years after Walker released Stolen: Surviving St. Michael’s, an eight-episode podcast series exploring her father’s experience at a Canadian residential school in the 1960s. Through her relentless reporting, she and her team unearthed decades of hidden abuse. One huge resource - the trove of personal testimonies. But in just one year, many of these testimonies, much like her father’s, will be destroyed.

Following a Supreme Court of Canada Decision, roughly 38,000 personal accounts of abuse collected through the Independent Assessment Project (IAP) will be destroyed by September 2027, unless individuals opt in to preserve them. In response, Walker’s team is building a new survivor-led archive so that survivors can preserve their records before time runs out.

"We've spent the last several weeks in courthouses in Toronto, Ottawa and Cochrane scanning over 70 boxes of court records related to Indian Residential Schools and it's becoming more clear than ever just how much truth there is left to uncover,” Walker told us. “We are still learning so much about the experiences of children at Indian Residential Schools but even our initial research has raised some serious questions about the process surrounding the impending document destruction."

Walker is working with the Yellowhead Institute to launch the public campaign, The Right to Truth: Protecting Indian Residential School Records. The mission of the event is to discuss what is at risk if survivors’ records are lost. Alongside Walker, the Sept. 30 conversation will include Kimberly Murray, Marie Wilson, Stephen Kakfwi and Hayden King.

Learn more about Stolen: Surviving St. Michael’s here.