Listening Recommendation // Stolen Season 2: Surviving St. Michael’s

In the second season of the award-winning podcast, Connie Walker's 2021-22 investigation of her family’s experience at a Saskatchewan residential school run by the Catholic Church offers a glimpse into the widescale abuse of Indigenous children that took place for over a century at schools across Canada, and the shrinking window to hold aging offenders accountable.

In May 2021, journalist Connie Walker’s brother Hal told her a story she’d never heard before about their father, Howard Cameron, who died in 2013.

On a night in the late 1970s when Cameron was working for the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, he pulled over a suspected drunk driver. Once the man emerged from the vehicle, Cameron recognized him as one of the priests from St. Michael’s, a Catholic residential school in Duck Lake, Saskatchewan. Like several generations of children from the Beardy's and Okemasis First Nation community, Cameron and all his siblings attended the school, which was operated until 1982 by the Missionary Oblates of Mary Immaculate. And, like many Indigenous children who attended Canadian residential schools, Cameron and his siblings had disclosed that they were sexually abused by the priests and nuns who worked there. The priest Cameron happened to pull over that night in the 1970s was one of his abusers. In Cameron’s telling to Walker’s brother, he took justice into his own hands and beat up the driver. Although many priests who had worked at St. Michael’s were accused of sexually abusing children, none have ever been held accountable by the church or government.

What starts as Walker’s investigation to see if she can identify the priest her father pulled over evolves into a much bigger story of the thousands of Indigenous children whose childhoods were stolen from them, often by the priests and nuns who were charged with their care at the 100+ Canadian residential schools that operated for more than a century.

Stolen: Surviving St. Michael’s is by no means the first effort to report in-depth on the horrific treatment of First Nations, Inuit, and Métis children, often at the hands of clergy, at residential schools across Canada. Nor is it Walker’s first time reporting on the subject in her roughly two decades as a journalist, much of which has been dedicated to covering the murders and disappearances of Indigenous women and girls in Canada, the multigenerational impacts of residential schools, and the country’s efforts to document the experiences of residential school survivors through the 2008-2015 National Truth and Reconciliation Commission (NTRC). What Surviving St. Michael’s brings into sharp focus, however, were the limits of accountability and redress under the NTRC process. It also puts into perspective just how ubiquitous abuse likely was at schools operated by the Catholic Church.

“The victims were scrutinized, not the abusers.”

While the history of church-run residential schools in Canada dates back to the early 1830s, the federal government adopted an official policy of funding these schools across the country in the 1880s and made attendance compulsory for Treaty-status children between the ages of 7 and 15 in 1920. More than 150,000 children attended these government-funded, predominantly church-operated schools before the last one closed in 1996. Many of those children never made it home—a fact that has been making international headlines since 2021, as ground-penetrating radar surveys continue to uncover probable unmarked gravesites by the hundreds on the grounds of former schools across Canada. Of those children who did return, many never spoke publicly about the abuse they experienced. One of the survivors credited for breaking the dam of silence is Phil Fontaine (Sagkeeng First Nation), who in a 1990 CBC interview spoke openly about his time at an Oblate-run residential school in Manitoba.

Over the next decade, more survivors started opening up about their experiences and demanding justice. By the early 2000s, survivors who filed lawsuits against the church and government seeking damages for the abuse started winning their cases and being awarded large sums of money. With as many as 20,000 active lawsuits at one point, the Oblates, who ran 48 of the nation’s 144 schools, feared that the cases would bankrupt them. The Canadian government, who had funded the schools, was also desperate to limit their liability, and wanted to settle with the thousands of survivors. Through a settlement reached in 2006, survivors could apply for compensation from the government—at least $10,000 for every eligible claim with some survivors being eligible for up to $275,000 if they had been abused.

Walker points out that many survivors dropped active lawsuits in order to file claims and take a settlement payment because they needed the money. But under the terms of the settlement, they gave up their right to sue again and paid the steep emotional price of having to prove that their claims of abuse were credible through what was called the Independent Assessment Process (IAP). Walker explains the process in episode five, “It’s Not Over”:

The IAP compensated survivors without them having to go to court, which could take years. It was meant to be faster, easier, and less confrontational. But many survivors say they still felt like their abuse and their memories were on trial. They had spent their lives trying to forget what they went through at residential school, trying to block out the abuse. But the IAP forced them to lay everything bare.

After they applied, they had to attend a hearing. In front of government lawyers, they were sworn in. Then the questions began. An adjudicator asked them in graphic detail about the abuse they experienced.

What happened to you?

How many times did it happen?

Who did it?

Over and over again, survivors were grilled about their memories of some of the worst moments in their lives…The burden was on survivors to try to convince an adjudicator who would decide their case that what they were saying was true.

On one hand, the IAP and the NTRC are more significant official actions on the part of the Canadian government than the US has yet to take to address the impact of its violent colonial policies against Indigenous people, many of whom on both sides of the border share the experience of being removed from their families and sexually abused at government-funded schools.[1] And, specific to forcible assimilation through education, there were many more federally funded boarding schools in the US than there were in Canada.[2] At the same time, although the IAP offered compensation, it offered little in the way of justice for survivors because their cases weren’t handled like they were victims of a crime. It retraumatized survivors and put the onus on them to “prove” that their claims of sexual abuse were true. Meanwhile, none of their named abusers ever faced criminal charges.

As Walker puts it, “There's a stigma attached to being a victim of sexual abuse and the IAP made it worse because the victims were scrutinized, not the abusers.”

“There should be prison busloads of them.”

The IAP started in 2007 and concluded in 2020. All told, over 38,000 people filed claims, resulting in nearly 27,000 claimants participating in hearings like the ones Walker describes. Those numbers are significant because the IAP records represent by far the most comprehensive account of the Canadian residential school experience. But, to protect survivors’ privacy, the records are all sealed and scheduled to be destroyed in September 2027 unless survivors ask to have them preserved. At the time of Walker’s reporting in 2022, only 28 survivors had asked to have their records archived.

Through some ingenious investigative problem-solving, Walker and her colleague Chantelle Bellrichard found a work-around for accessing information proximate to the IAP records, particularly with respect to the St. Michael’s survivors who dropped lawsuits in order to participate in the IAP. From a list provided by the Canadian Department of Justice of all the civil lawsuits that involved plaintiffs who attended St. Michael’s, Walker and Bellrichard learned that there were 482 lawsuits filed—the records of which were buried in boxes in storage facilities across the country.

From the document roundup that followed (around 20,000 pages in total), Walker’s team found that from the 1910s to 1990, 15 staff members, 13 nuns, and 17 Oblate priests were accused of sexual abuse at St. Michael’s. From the lawsuit records, they counted 219 allegations against those 45 adults, meaning the majority of the accused had more than one allegation against them. Notably, based on the general statistic that 60-80% of sexual assaults go unreported, the allegations documented in the lawsuits likely represent a massive undercount.

In episode seven, “Workers of God,” Walker details this process of obtaining the records from the lawsuits filed prior to the IAP that were dropped, and what they found in them. This is a revelatory point in Surviving St. Michael’s, because without access to the IAP records—documents that would give the most complete glimpse into the scale of abuse at Canadian residential schools—the lawsuits of the St. Michael’s survivors offer a hell of a window into just how ubiquitous abuse likely was. Walker explains:

...from what we can see from these lawsuits, students say abuse was happening at the highest levels of the school. Four out of five of the last Oblate principles from St. Michael's are accused sexual abusers. They were at the school between 1939 and 1972. When I talked to Gauthier [the priest accused by many of Walker’s own family members of sexual abuse], he said the way to stop abuse was to tell the superior, but if the person in charge was sexually abusing children, what would stop staff, nuns, and other priests from doing the same?

Take the year 1963 as an example: Anthony Duhaime was principal and there were four other priests at the school who reported to him, and all of them are accused of sexual abuse.

If these claims are true, every single priest at St. Michael's in 1963 was sexually abusing children. And every single priest was getting away with it.

Despite the mountains of allegations, Walker’s team found no record of an Oblate priest from St. Michael’s ever being convicted. In an interview about Oblates accused of abuse with Rob Talach, a lawyer known for his work on church sex abuse cases, he tells Walker that “there should be prison busloads of them” based on simple math.

The Oblates ran 70% of the Catholic residential schools in Canada. If we consider that false reports of sexual assault are extremely rare (false reporting rates are 2-8%) and that most assaults will never be reported, we can expect at least 92% of the allegations to be true. And if every single priest working at one school in 1963 was accused of sexually abusing children, it’s reasonable to believe that—at least at that point in time—abuse was the norm and not an exception. Moreover, it strains belief to imagine that this was isolated to St. Michael’s because many of the priests also worked at schools in other provinces.

The Silent Shuffle and a Shrinking Window for Accountability

Those who joined us for our community screening of Sugarcane back in January, or are familiar with the film, will recall a scene when the late former Williams Lake First Nation Chief Rick Gilbert meets with a Vatican priest in 2022. In the conversation, Gilbert says that three to four generations of most Williams Lake Reserve families, including his own, were abused at St. Joseph’s Mission School. He also discloses that his own birth was the result of his mother being raped by a priest, and that he kept his abuse from his own time at the school secret for about 30 years.

Gilbert raises another point with the Vatican priest—one that partially explains why so many priests were never held accountable for abusing Indigenous children across Canada. Priests accused of abuse were generally not removed from service, they were just moved around, often to other schools, sometimes to other countries. The abuse would continue. Allegations would follow abusers wherever they’d go. And the cycle would continue. There was evidence of this at St. Michael’s as well, and there’s a name for this practice: the silent shuffle.

In Walker’s previously mentioned interview with Rob Talach for episode seven, he explains how the silent shuffle protected abusers for years. “You just transfer the guy out of the province or out of the country and when the police come knocking, there's nobody to interview.”

As an example, Talach cites the case of the former Belgian Oblate priest Eric Dejaeger, who’s been convicted of abusing numerous Inuit children between 1978 and 1982 while he was at a residential school in Igloolik, Nunavut. Dejaeger was sent back to Belgium by the Oblates in 1995, and in a brief letter from the Oblate supervisor in Canada that year, he was notified that the police had come looking for him, that they told the police they didn’t know his whereabouts, and that he should stay away from Canada because he would face criminal charges if he came back. Dejaeger managed to escape justice for his abuse until 2015, when he was convicted of 32 counts of child sex abuse from his time in Igloolik. He was released on parole in 2022 after serving just seven years in prison, but was convicted in January 2025 for an additional seven counts of child sex abuse in Igloolik, and is currently serving a six-year prison sentence.

Talach makes another point in his conversation with Walker that echoes what the Vatican priest tells Gilbert in Sugarcane. That is, sexual abuse of children was historically viewed as a “moral failing” within Catholic organizations who ran many Canadian residential schools. A moral failing: something that could be overcome through prayer, or “making a retreat,” not a violent crime that the perpetrators should lose their jobs and face criminal charges for.

Now, readers, we want you to know that your editor writing this is conflicted about calling this view “historical”—like it’s something of a bygone era. Officially, yes, the Oblates have publicly changed their tone with regards to allegations of abuse at residential schools from one of obfuscation and denialism to outwardly apologetic. And individual Oblate priests now need a letter of suitability from their superior before they can be transferred anywhere. But casting abuse as a “moral failing” rather than a violent crime is, as we’ve seen from the serial abuse perpetrated by priests and nuns, a hell of a way to guarantee a future of putting more victims in harm’s way. Whether or not the institutions change their tune, the consequences of this belief are still causing damage, still unfolding. It’s hard to believe that the “moral failing” view is historical when so little action has been taken by church and state to address such widely documented crimes against children, the reverberations of which are still felt in Indigenous communities throughout North America.

Many of the abusers have died without facing criminal charges. Those still alive are elderly, as is the case with Dejaeger, who is now 78 years old, and Gilles Gauthier, the priest who speaks to Connie in episode six, “Father Gauthier” and has since passed away at the age of 92. The church’s practice of the silent shuffle not only enabled abusers to continue harming children, but has also significantly shrunk the window to hold abusers accountable—particularly in light of studies that have found that anywhere between 47 and 57.5% of child survivors do not tell anyone about their sexual abuse for over five years.[3] The more vulnerable the victim, the more the timeline for disclosing abuse generally lengthens. For Indigenous children, who were told they were “savages” and then abused by adults who claimed to be next to God, it’s easy to imagine why some survivors like Rick Gilbert in Sugarcane took closer to 30 years to open up about their experience.[4]

Picking Medicine

In the final episode of Surviving St. Michaels, “The Shining Ones,” Walker closes with audio from a trip out into the woods near the Beardy’s and Okemasis Reserve to collect sweetgrass with her brother Hal. Joining them are her daughter Sequin and her husband Chuck. Walker relates that earlier in her reporting trip, Sequin, age 10 at the time, had a nightmare about being taken away from her parents and sent to a residential school with her cousins. When she woke up, Walker tried to console her and assure her that that would never happen again to any Indigenous child. She admits that she felt guilty that Sequin was afraid:

I want her to know the truth about what happened in residential schools. But more than that, I want her to know the beauty in our culture, in our families, in our communities, to have moments like this, where she can pick medicine with her Uncle Hal and hear stories about her Mooshum[5] Howard.

This echoes an interview Walker includes near the beginning of the season with Eugene Arcand (Muskeg Lake Cree Nation), a St. Michael’s survivor who knew Connie’s father and is now involved in the National Centre for Truth and Reconciliation’s efforts as part of their Survivors Circle. Like many survivors who were frustrated for years as none of their abusers were ever held accountable, Arcand admits to taking revenge into his own hands much like Walker’s father did in the story from the late 1970s. He discloses (and witnesses verify his account) that at a 2014 event for residential school survivors in Edmonton, Alberta, Arcand had a confrontation with Father Gauthier that ended with him holding the priest over a balcony, threatening to throw him off. In the years since, Arcand has come to feel that revenge is not the same as healing—he views the latter as far more important. For Arcand and many survivors, healing has come from reconnecting with their language and their culture.

Walker’s ability to shine a light on the grave miscarriage of justice by powerful institutions, all while ensuring the loudest voices telling the story of St. Michael’s are the survivors themselves, is flat-out virtuosic. And it’s on full display in the second season of Stolen. It’s little wonder how Surviving St. Michael’s garnered both a Pulitzer Prize and a Peabody Award in 2023—making it the first podcast to win both awards in the same year.

Whether it’s your first time listening to Stolen, or you’ve decided that you’re overdue for a reheat (this editor certainly was), Surviving St. Michael’s is worth a considered listen. If you fire it up, notice Walker’s constant weighing of the ethical implications of her reporting, and how it shapes the story. Following her conversation with Eugene Arcand, for example, she seriously questions whether she’s off base in wanting to identify her father’s abuser, and whether it’s even her story to tell. In response, she doubles down by lifting up the voices of survivors in the following episode, omitting her own narration almost entirely in favor of letting over two dozen survivors’ tell about their time at St. Michael’s.

Similarly, when Walker secures an interview with Father Gauthier, the priest who seems most likely to have been her father’s abuser, both the Oblates and the aging priest’s doctor cautioned her against airing the interview, stating that on the grounds of Gauthier’s Alzheimer's, any information he shares should not be taken as credible. Ultimately, her team decides that the public has a right to hear from a man who's been accused of sexually abusing children in what would probably be their only chance to talk to him (which turned out to be the case).

Notice also the tactics used by the Catholic Church and the Canadian government, some of which we’ve described in depth here, that have created the crisis of a shrinking window for accountability. The few priests that have faced criminal charges for their abuse of children, like Eric Dejaeger, are quite elderly, and had many years to keep abusing before they were ever put behind bars. Many other priests and nuns accused, including Gilles Gauthier now, have died without ever having to answer to their accusers. Knowing that most abuse is perpetrated by serial abusers, how does this land with you? Are you disappointed in institutions that not only failed to protect children, but might’ve knowingly put more in harm’s way?

And what do you think of the historical (but, as we’ve argued here, still very modern) view within religious organizations of abuse of power as a moral failing rather than a crime? Do you think it’s possible for an offender to understand the harm done, particularly to a vulnerable person like a child, when we discuss their violations in terms of morals, which are relative, rather than the laws that we’re all subject to as citizens? Do you think it’s possible to have accountability that actually changes behavior when we reduce abuse to a moral failing?

Where do you see this pattern actively or possibly playing out again—where abusers are ultimately being protected by powerful institutions, even as the abusers’ atrocities and institutions’ complicity is being laid bare?

Where do you see the abuse survivors suffered as children carrying over into their adult lives, their treatment of their own partners, children, and family members? What other ways do you see the ingenerational effects of trauma playing out?

Where do some of the survivors say they've found healing or justice? How do you think justice and healing are connected? Or are those separate things in your mind?

These are all thought-provoking questions that Surviving St. Michael’s creates the space to ponder, through careful reportage, downright investigative wizardry (in the case of the work-around for the off-limits IAP records), and putting the voices of survivors at the center.

Walker’s storytelling is acclaimed for good reason, and in our estimation, Surviving St. Michael’s is essential listening for those committed to understanding the legacy of residential/boarding schools in North America, and following the lead of survivors toward truth, reconciliation, and healing. Embedded below is the trailer for the second season from Spotify. For finding season 2 in the feed, keep in mind that this season contains eight episodes (not including the trailer) published between May and June 2022.

About Stolen

Stolen Season 2: Surviving St. Michael's contains detailed references to violence and sexual abuse against children. It’s powerful and important to engage with stories like the ones reported in this podcast, but we encourage everyone to take care of themselves while listening.

Other seasons of Stolen are also deeply insightful about the intergenerational impacts of violence and abuse in Indigenous communities in the US and Canada. In the first season, The Search for Jermain, Connie Walker investigates the June 2018 disappearance of Jermain Charlo, a mother of two and a member of the Confederated Salish and Kootenai Tribes, and the pattern of abuse that defined her relationship with her former partner leading up to the night she was last seen in downtown Missoula. Check out our recommendation for the inaugural season of Stolen to learn what stands out to us about this story, and how it’s become the backdrop of a federal firearms ruling that could have statewide implications for abusers’ access to guns in Montana. The most recent season, Trouble in Sweetwater, investigates the cases of two missing women on the Navajo Nation, and the challenging search for justice in a remote place where people say you can get away with murder.

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Notes

[1] The US didn’t issue its first formal apology for Indian boarding schools until 2024, about 16 years after Canada issued its own apology and established the NTRC.

[2] The latest research from National Native American Boarding School Healing Coalition has identified 526 Indian boarding schools in the US, 125 of which are still open today.

[3] A 2000 study published by psychology department faculty at University of Arkansas, Fayetteville found that 28% of child rape victims reported that they had never told anyone about their child rape prior to the research interview and 47% did not disclose for over five years post-rape. A 2016 article cited a 2009 adult retrospective study of child sexual abuse survivors where 57.5% said they delayed disclosing their abuse for more than five years.

[4] Check out our recommendation for Sugarcane to learn about the award-winning documentary and find a link to where you can stream it at home.

[5] Cree for grandfather.