25. Beneath the Surface: Hope and Justice for Indigenous Women and Girls

Beneath the Surface: Hope and Justice for Indigenous Women and Girls

Angela Sterritt with Tina Munroe 

Reading and Conversation 

Bellevue 

5:00 – 6:00 pm 

Saturday Stories Sponsor 

“She could have been me.” Award-winning Gitxsan investigative journalist Angela Sterritt speaks with Tina Munroe about Unbroken: My Fight for Survival, Hope, and Justice for Indigenous Women and Girls. Part memoir, part investigation, Angela reflects on the struggles of her own upbringing, and shows how colonialism and racism has led to a society where the lives of Indigenous women and girls are ignored and devalued. 

Angela Sterritt

Angela Sterritt is an award-winning investigative journalist and national bestselling author from the Wilp Wiik’aax of the Gitanmaax community within the Gitxsan Nation on her dad’s side and from Bell Island Newfoundland on her maternal side. She has worked as a television, radio, and digital journalist for more than a decade, and is currently the host of the CBC original podcast Land Back, which won a Radio Television Digital News Association award for best podcast.

Angela won an Academy Award (Canadian Screen Award) for best reporter of the year in Canada and a national Radio Television Digital News Association award for her coverage of an Indigenous man and his granddaughter who were arrested while trying to open a bank account at BMO. also won a national Radio Television Digital News Association award for the same reporting. Vancouver Magazine’s Power 50 named her one of the city’s top 50 most influential people.
Other accolades include a nomination for best local reporter by the Canadian Screen, an RTDNA award for best long feature, the Investigative Award of the Year from Canadian Journalists for Free Expression for coverage of missing and murdered Indigenous women. She was awarded a prestigious William Southam Journalism Fellowship at Massey College in Toronto - the first known First Nations person in Canada to receive the award.

Her book, Unbroken: My Fight for Survival, Hope, and Justice for Indigenous Women and Girls is a remarkable work of memoir and investigative journalism focusing on missing and murdered Indigenous women and girls. Tanya Talaga says "Sterritt's story is living proof of how courageous Indigenous women are. Listen to her voice and hear the sound of the land, hear the sound of our women weeping but also raging—refusing to be neglected or ignored any longer.”

Tina Munroe 

Tina Munroe is PhD student in the Queen’s Department of English. She identifies as a non-status Anishinaabe (Saulteaux) woman who grew up in the city far from her mother’s homeland and spends a lot of time thinking about what the repatriation of Indigenous land and life could look like if imagined beyond the parameters of capitalism or the Indian Act. Her research interests include Indigenous literatures of Turtle Island, Indigenous philosophy and critical theory, representations of urban Indigeneity, and he Indigenous body as Home/Land. For her PhD, she considers the ways urban Indigenous people made “dispossessed" of traditional homelands relate to place and space in cities plagued by racial violence like her hometown of Thunder Bay. She has been a guest speaker at Lakehead’s Indigenous Graduate Speaker Series and National Centre for Truth and Reconciliation "NCTR Dialogue: Land Back" event, and moderator for Thunder Bay’s “Tea with Kokum”.