A new project from award-winning journalist Connie Walker aims to create an archive of testimonies of abuse at residential schools before the accounts are destroyed in September 2027. 

“It just made me feel like we should be doing whatever we can to preserve as many survivor accounts as we possibly can,” said Walker, who is a member of Okanese First Nation in Saskatchewan.
 
“There are 38,000 records of survivors that are set to be destroyed … and I think that a lot of people don’t know that this is about to happen.”

Her Pulitzer Prize-winning podcast Stolen: Surviving St. Michael’s looked into her father’s experience at a Catholic-run residential school in Duck Lake, Sask., and was a profound experience, according to Walker. She said she hopes the archive will allow people to develop the same understanding of other schools.