What happens when Indigenous women tell their own stories?

Demonstrators march for Red Dress Day in Edmonton, Canada to commemorate the lives of missing and murdered Indigenous women.

The crisis of violence looks completely different, says Pulitzer-winning Cree journalist Connie Walker

In 1995, a Saulteaux woman in Regina, Saskatchewan, was brutally beaten to death by two young white men who had spent the night drinking and were looking for an “Indian prostitute.” Those were the exact words used by the killers—and then repeated by the media and the presiding judge in the case of Pamela George, a mother of two and a member of the Sakimay First Nation. 

Words matter: According to the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC), the justice  “reminded the jury George ‘indeed was a prostitute’ when they considered if she had consented to sex.” That assertion that she must have done so (even though one of her killers was hiding in the trunk when she was picked up by the other) “was the key to the two being found guilty on the lesser charge” of manslaughter. The men were sentenced to six and a half years, but one of them, Steven Kummerfield, whom news outlets described as a “university basketball star,” was released on parole after only four years.

As this story unfolded and as Native women’s groups grew more outraged by the case, a young Cree teenager, Connie Walker, was witnessing it all. She was so moved by Pamela George’s mistreatment in news media that she wrote about the case for her high school newsletter—and began what became a barrier-breaking journalism career, eventually winning a Pulitzer, a Peabody, and hosting the podcast Stolen, about unsolved cases of murdered or missing Indigenous people in North America.

Last year, at the global summit Free Future 2023, Walker reflected on the impact that coverage of the original case had on her. “They didn’t talk about the fact that she was a single mother,” she noted. She found herself wondering, “Are there any Indigenous people in these newsrooms?” 

Statistically, there aren’t: The Columbia Journalism Review reported as recently as 2019 that less than one percent of journalists working at major newspapers or online publications are Native American. The report also found that most newsrooms don’t have a designated beat to cover “Indian Country,” the still commonly used legal term that encompasses all of the reservations in the United States and non-reservation communities with high concentrations of Indigenous people. 

A report released the following year by the Native American Journalists Association tracked how frequently Native news was covered in a single year across five major outlets (Washington Post, NPR, The New York Times, The Guardian, Fox News) and found that of the 87 articles that mentioned Native communities, a majority were written by non-Native reporters. How many Native reporters were found to have worked on one of those 87 articles? Six. 

That absence of representation has unique implications for reporting on sexual violence. In the United States, 56% of Native women have experienced sexual violence, according to Amnesty International. In the U.S. alone, there are more than 5,000 reported and unsolved cases of missing or murdered Indigenous women, girls, two-spirit and trans people (MMIWG2T).  As Dr. Sarah Deer said in 2017. “While there are over 560 federally recognized tribes in this country, each with a unique history, culture, and language, the constant for all native people is the inevitability of rape.” 

Who tells these stories matters. While we have long been told that reporting is about being “objective,” Walker points out that that has never really been true. “One of the things that I'm grateful is happening right now [is]...a recognition of how subjective journalism is, and has always been,” she has said. “And I think that for so long—in Canada, the United States, everywhere—that those stories have been told by people who aren't representative of the societies that they're reporting on.” Her work changes that—as does the work of journalists like Brandi Morin and Chelsea Curtis and initiatives like the IWMF’s Fund for Indigenous Journalists or the National Indigenous Women’s Resource Center.  

 “There’s a power in being able to tell a story,” says Walker. “There’s a responsibility in that.”