Stolen · Spotify Studios

The Police Officer and the Priest

May 17, 2022·37 min·3 clips

A police officer recognized the man he pulled over for drunk driving as the priest who sexually abused him at residential school, then dragged him from the car and beat him on the side of a dark Saskatchewan road.

A dark road carries the first turn. The host starts in rural Saskatchewan, where gravel roads and small highways can make night feel too wide and too quiet. Her father, alone in his patrol car, sees taillights swerving and walks toward a driver he knows from a different, far worse setting. The recognition is quiet. That makes it harder to shake. From there, the episode moves back to St. Michael's Indian Residential School in Duck Lake, where she believes her father first met the priest who abused him. The school is still vivid in memory: red brick, three or four stories high, empty in a way that feels closer to an abandoned hospital than a school. The history arrives plainly. Residential schools separated Indigenous children from family, language, culture, and identity. More than 100 schools operated for over 100 years, including at least 20 in Saskatchewan, and St. Michael's closed in 1996. The episode does not soften the record. Survivors describe neglect, physical and sexual abuse, nutritional experiments, and one school's homemade electric chair punishment. Canada's Truth and Reconciliation Commission called the system cultural genocide, and the host lets that sit without dressing it up. Then Duck Lake comes back into focus. Ground-penetrating radar found what are believed to be the remains of 200 residents. By ending with survivor resources and a request for information, the episode keeps the investigation tied to care, not just answers.

As heard by us

A roadside encounter opens into the slow, devastating history of residential schools.

A dark Saskatchewan roadside encounter opens into the history of St. Michael's Indian Residential School in Duck Lake and the wider system that backed it.

Read the full review in PlayNext →

Why you'd press play

A roadside encounter in rural Saskatchewan opens into family memory and the legacy of residential schools.

Read the full recommendation in PlayNext →

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