Stolen Podcast: Review

In these next episodes, it becomes clear why the podcast is called Stolen and how the stealing happens within the Indigenous community.

There’s two common hurdles in society with hearing Indigenous stories: downplaying and tokenizing. They are two sides of the same coin: both steal the voices of Indigenous people and assume.

There are people like Father Duhaime, who deny the terror they’re causing by preaching the value of English and Western ideologies. He assumes he knows what’s best for the community.

Then there are people who tokenize and play with Indigenous stories to get notoriety, like what Eugene Arcand warns Connie Walker against. This is more insidious because it’s under the guise of wanting to do what’s right and it seems positive. However, this line of thinking also assumes what’s best for the community.

Neither of these approaches gets to the source and asks the question: “What do Indigenous people want to say about their own experiences?”

This is not always clear cut. It can be easy to tokenize and assume even when you’re a part of the community because you want justice for your people. Howard is her father, and she was aUected by his trauma. Because of this, she assumed she could do what she wanted, but what she will never know is what it’s like to go to a residential school.

Showing how Indigenous stories get played with is important because it’s too common, easy to fall into, and it often gets overlooked. Playing is a good word for it because it makes Indigenous people feel like toys designed to make others feel righteous. You are no longer a person with experiences and boundaries, you’re a tool to gain “woke” approval from others.

Walker fixes her mistakes by letting residential school survivors tell their own stories without interjecting her perspective or narrating. Showing this course correction was smart because it shows the listener what they can do if they fall into this or see it in society. It makes the viewer trust her more because it shows her own imperfection and her willingness to own up to it.

I thought it was important to have short sound bites back-to-back of the survivors often sharing the same experiences. A common conspiracy theory is residential school survivors are lying about what happened to them, that it wasn’t as bad as they say. When you piece

the stories altogether from 28 different survivors who don’t know each other and they’re all sharing similar experiences, it’s hard to deny it.

Listening to what helps the survivors heal stood out to me. They have their childhoods and voices stolen, which makes them disconnected from their roots and other people. Healing was about hearing from their culture, each other, and their families.

Crying for each other, not for themselves as a form of healing felt metaphorical to put in this episode. It showed that empathy, bonding together and listening is the way through, something Walker had to learn by doing this podcast.

Playing the Honour song in the end was powerful because she took the whole episode to honour their stories from their perspectives. Drumming to the rhythm of a heartbeat is meant to heal you and connect you to your roots. Walker put it in not for non-Indigenous people learning about our community, but for the residential school survivors and their families to feel connected. She kept the focus on them, not on her cause.