Two Indigenous wins for Pulitzer Prize

This year’s winners include a First Nations podcaster who

focused on her father’s boarding school experience

By Kalle Benallie

Indian Country Today

Among the winners of this year’s Pulitzer

Prizes, which recognizes the best of journalism

and the arts, included investigative reporter

and host Connie Walker, Okanese First Nation

(Cree) and the Gimlet Media team won for

audio journalism.

The winners were announced May 8.

“Stolen: Surviving St. Michael’s,” told in

eight episodes, focused on Walker’s investigation

into her father’s past and the abuse of hundreds

of Indigenous children at a residential school

in Canada.

“Honestly, I’ve been pinching myself over

this news. It is such an incredible honor for our

work on Surviving St. Michael’s to receive this

recognition. It feels like proof that Indigenous

stories matter and that Indigenous people

should be supported to help tell them,” Walker

said in a press release. “Above all, our team

hopes that this means that more people will hear

the stories of the survivors who bravely shared

their experiences with us and recognize that this

is just the beginning in terms of what it means

to learn the truth and try to collectively grow

and heal from our past.”

Reporter Betty Ann Adam, a citizen of the

Fond du Lac Denesuline Nation in northern

Saskatchewan, also worked on the podcast.

The podcast has additionally won the Alfred

I. duPont-Columbia University Award and

the recently announced Peabody award in the

podcast and radio category.

The third season of “Stolen” will be released

in the fall and will be about Connie and the

team investigating the case of two missing

Navajo women.

“It’s huge—27,000 square miles of remote

terrain with fewer than 200 tribal police

officers,” Walker said. “One thing I’ve learned

so far is that on the Navajo Nation, the line

between missing and murdered is often difficult

to prove. In many ways, this season builds on

the themes we’ve explored in previous seasons,

but hopefully in a way that feels different and

exciting to our listeners.”

Other categories in the Pulitzer Prize were

for books, drama and music. Michael John

Witgen, a citizen of the Red Cliff Band of Lake

Superior Ojibwe, was awarded as a finalist in

history for his book “Seeing Red: Indigenous

Land, American Expansion, and the Political

Economy of Plunder in North America.”

Witgen is a professor at Columbia University

in the department of history and the Center for

the Study of Ethnicity and Race.

The book is about the Anishinaabeg, how

they resisted removal in their homelands and

became key players in the political economy

of the Old Northwest by advancing a dual

citizenship that enabled mixed-race tribal

citizens to lay claim to a place in U.S. civil

society.

“Telling the stories of mixed-race traders

and missionaries, tribal leaders and territorial

governors, Witgen challenges our assumptions

about the inevitability of U.S. expansion,” the

summary states.

Witgen said he went in with the intention of

writing about the history of the American public

as a nation of settlers rather than immigrants and

U.S. expansion really being the colonization of

Native space.

“I’m happy that a project that centered that

message was received as well. That seems

like a positive step I think,” he said. “It’s

one of the reasons why I wanted to be an

historian, why I wanted to write the book, was

to help center Indigenous history as being North

American history. You can’t really separate

North American history or even U.S. history

from Native history,” he said.

He was surprised about being a finalist

because he did not know his book was submitted

for consideration until his publisher told him.

He also is appreciative of being recognized

alongside Walker.