In October 2015, Connie Walker received an email with the subject line “Alberta Williams.” Walker, then an investigative journalist at the CBC, had never heard of Williams, a Gitxsan woman who was murdered in 1989, at twenty-four, and whose killer had never been caught. The message contained a single line: the name of Williams’s alleged murderer.
By then, Walker had been trying to tell stories about missing and murdered Indigenous women and girls for years. Walker recalls reading a news story in 1996, when she was sixteen, about the murder of a Saulteaux woman named Pamela George, who was sexually assaulted and then brutally beaten by two young white men. Walker was struck by how George, a mother of two children, had been characterized by the media only as a sex worker. She wondered why there were no Indigenous journalists covering the murder. So she became one, writing about George in her first story for her high school newsletter.
