Produced for the CBC network program 'Tapestry,' this documentary tells the story of Donna Barker's desire to honour her years of marriage, despite an unexpected and painful break-up, through a 'divorce ritual.

CBC Radio 'Tapesty' Radio documentary 'Donna's June Divorce'

I've covered a few visits by the Dalai Lama to Vancouver. This is a conversation I had with Mary Hynes, host of the CBC network program 'Tapestry' about the earliest of those visits by the Tibetan spiritual leader, in 2004, which featured other Nobel Laureates including the Dalai Lama's great pal, Archbishop Desmond Tutu. The interview is followed by a soundscape documentary I edited of highlights of the 4-day visit.

CBC Radio documentary 'Tapestry' - 'Infinite Compassion'

Tucker Goodwin was my friend and a surrogate dad to me for a while. He passed away in 2021 and CBC Radio re-aired a couple of versions of a feature I produced about him. It was a celebration of one man's love for that sweetest, corniest of art forms: barbershop singing. Dec/2008

CBC Radio feature Heart of my Heart - The Man Who Loved Barbershop

'Passaggio' - my one-hour radio documentary for CBC IDEAS originally aired Dec. 20, 2021 on the CBC network radio program IDEAS and around the world and has become something of a seasonal classic! It has been re-aired multiple times include Dec. 20, 2021, Jan 2022, Dec. 2022 and Dec 2023. 

Two years in the making, this documentary follows the gender transition of my classically-trained-opera-singer young adult child through a mother-son lens and is a very personal story of gender, culture, identity and love.

Listen here or click on the link to go to the CBC link with an online article with photos I wrote to accompany the documentary. You can also hear the radio doc from the CBC page. https://www.cbc.ca/radio/ideas/passaggio-a-story-of-transition-identity-and-love-1.6292482?fbclid=IwAR0LjUFUVfrEp6TFdg0aEgrSv3yEIFOXSH-DcBPeXGPf5guFiWQyX3CfRVU

CBC IDEAS  'Passaggio'

My 2011 CBC radio documentary for the network program 'The Sunday Edition' about the Infant Garden at Vancouver's Mountainview Cemetery and the decades-old grief that was buried so deep for many mothers whose babies were stillborn or died a few minutes or weeks after birth from 1907 up until the early 1970's.

CBC Sunday Edition documentary - 'Buried So Deep' - Pamela Post

My latest one-hour CBC IDEAS radio documentary: 'A Tale of Two Metlakatlas: my Matriarchs, the Missionaries and Me' (aired in May and June and July 2023) traces the last 3 generations of my Ts'msyen family. Through intimate family stories, it shows some of the roots of the MMIWG2S epidemic and other harms of colonization. It also examines healing from intergenerational trauma and resilience through matriarchal love, set against an almost cinematic historical backdrop of the fur trade, missionaries, the potlatch ban and the theft or destruction of sacred and supernatural objects: naxnox - dance masks; gwishalaayt - chilkat blankets; pts'aan - totem poles of the Ts'msyen people; devastating epidemics and a great exodus of Ts'msyen people from Canada to the US in 1887. It is a counter-narrative to colonial history that centred a famous missionary, too often casting my ancestors in the bit roles of a lost and primitive people in need of saving. You can listen here by clicking the player or go to the CBC IDEAS link to my documentary to see photos of some of the people and places in the documentary. Nt'oyaxsn (thanks) for listening, reading and looking! https://www.cbc.ca/radio/ideas/two-metlakatlas-ts-ymsen-matriarchs-1.6856048  (And a sidebar CBC First Person story I wrote about the healing power of Ts'msyen ceremony to accompany the doc) https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/returning-dad-s-ashes-to-the-skeena-river-1.6883123

CBC IDEAS 'A Tale of Two Metlakatlas: my Matriarchs, the Missionaries and Me'

CBC Radio doc I produced for NXNW about famed Vancouver street photographer Foncie Pulice, including some personal memories.

CBC North by Northwest (NXNW)  'A Moment in Time, Captured'

CBC Radio documentary by Pamela Post
That Which Makes us Haida: The Haida Language
North by Northwest (NXNW)

CBC North by Northwest (NXNW) 'That Which Makes Us Haida'

CBC Radio documentary 'Four Little Strings' about my 10 weeks in 'Ruby's Ukes' ukulele school and the good medicine that come from four little strings. First aired on the network program 'The Story From Here' and re-played on the CBC BC province-wide arts program 'North by Northwest (NXNW)' (30 min)

CBC Radio documentary - Four LIttle Strings

Audio recorded circa 1960 by CBC Radio Producer Imbert Orchard in the Kitselas Canyon in northwest British Columbia.
Former Kitsumkalum chief Ben Bolton (my Dad's cousin)shares the name and story of a local bird that in the Ts'msyen language of Sm'algyax, has a special meaning about salmonberries.

CBC Archival interview excerpt(1960) with my Ts'msyen uncle, Kitsumkalum Chief Ben Bolton

I was the coordinating producer for CBC British Columbia's month-long, in-depth coverage of the Truth and Reconciliation National Event in Vancouver in the fall of 2013. This is a story I turned-around overnight for use on CBC Radio morning shows throughout BC. A very personal story of reconciliation between a child survivor of residential schools who became an artist, singer/songwriter, Edward Gamblin and his former residential school teacher Florence Kaefer.

CBC radio feature, Indigenous Truth & Reconciliation, "You Were My Teacher"

Journalist Pamela Post in conversation with Sheryl Mackay of CBC's North by Northwest on the art of forest bathing, based on her 5 weeks with Ken Ouendag, Certified Forest Therapy Guide, and a group of fellow forest bathers in Stanley Park in 2018.

Pamela Post - CBC Radio North by Northwest feature - Forest Bathing

CLICK HERE TO HEAR THE FULL DOC WITH INTRO/EXTRO and read my online CBC story with photos: https://www.cbc.ca/radio/docproject/features/g%C3%A2teau-%C3%A0-l-orange-the-story-of-a-recipe-that-survived-the-holocaust-1.4375222/g%C3%A2teau-%C3%A0-l-orange-the-story-of-a-recipe-that-survived-the-holocaust-1.4375235/ My 2017/2018 CBC Radio documentary (half-hour) for 'The Doc Project.' This half hour network radio documentary received an outpouring of CBC listener response, including scores of people who baked the Holocaust recipe described in the documentary and sent us photos of their families and the cakes they baked as a symbol of the power of choosing light over darkness and love over hate, as the documentary's protagonists had during WWII. The doc was reprised in 2018 as the CBC network special for Remembrance Day. It also contains chilling reminders of the foothold organized hate is again taking in our world.

CBC The Doc Project: 'Gâteau à l'orange: Recipe for Love from a Nazi Death Camp'

A 7-minute excerpt I cut from a 30-minute interview between my Ts'msyen great-aunt Jemima Smith Bolton Stuart Dobbie and CBC Radio producer Imbert Orchard circa 1960 when Jemima was 75 years old, from the BC Archives at the Royal BC Museum.

Photo: My Ts'msyen great-aunt, Jemima Bolton Stuart Dobbie on the Copper River where it meets the Skeena River with one of her 10 children in the early 20th century. Jemima was born in 1885, the 4th child of Jane Smith of the Gispudwada (Killer Whale) clan of Kitsumkalum and Aaron Bolton of the Laxs'giik (Eagle)clan of Kitselas. She had 3 older siblings, a brother Mark, two older sisters Maud and Mary (my grandmother) and younger three half-sisters, Ellen, Priscilla and Janet. Jemima's father Aaron took his young son Mark Bolton, Jemima's brother, to go to Alaska along with over 800 other Ts'msyen people and an evangelical lay missionary named William Duncan to form a new 'Utopian Christian community' called 'New Metlakatla.' My great grandmother, Jane Smith possibly worked in the canneries including the Inverness cannery where she likely met a white man, twice her age, who was the cannery foreman. A man already called by those in the Skeena region: 'Old Dave Stuart' - in his 60's when Jane was 28. They would go on to have 3 daughters of their own. Jane died young at age 40, leaving her youngest daughters to be raised by her older daughters and an elderly Scottish father who was busy with his orchard farm. Jemima was more the age of a great-great aunt to me, and I never met her or her younger sister, my grandmother, who died long before Jemima. Hearing Jemima's voice for the first time in this tape a few years ago,  was so moving, sounded so much like my Auntie Fran, her niece, and still brings a tear to my eye.  It's like time travel.

Archival 1960 CBC interview with my Ts'msyen great-aunt Jemima Smith Bolton Stuart Dobbie

BIO:
Pamela Post is an award-winning journalist, broadcaster, educator and filmmaker based in Coast Salish territory (Vancouver, Canada). 

In the summer of 2023, she was gifted the Sm'algyax name Ggol'gm Hana'ack - 'Cloudberry Woman' to wear by Ts'msyen cultural leader Ahl'lidaaw Gitnack'angeak, president of the Tsimshian Tribal Association in Ketchikan, Alaska. 

She is an acclaimed storyteller, journalist and broadcaster of Ts'msyen and German-Canadian ancestry who recently produced her latest one-hour documentary 'A Tale of Two Metlakatlas: my Matriarchs, the Missionaries and Me' for CBC IDEAS (premiered: May 29, 2023; re-aired twice in June and July, 2023), accompanied by a CBC First Person online article Pamela wrote to accompany the doc - https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/returning-dad-s-ashes-to-the-skeena-river-1.6883123 - and preceded by her earlier IDEAS documentary 'Passaggio' (premiered: Dec. 2021 and re-aired Jan 2022/Dec. 2023)- a story of transition, identity and love that followed her son's gender transition through a mother-son, musical and Indigenous lens. 

She also has a short animated film in pre-production with award-winning Michif stop-motion animator Amanda Strong and Spotted Fawn Productions, titled 'Haboolm Ksinaalgat (SOUL CATCHER) -- a powerful cinematic tale inspired by a stories from her Ts'msyen father, John Post, with generous support and funding from the First Peoples Cultural Council, the Canada Council for the Arts (Creating, Knowing and Sharing) Indigenous Arts stream, the ISO (Indigenous Screen Office) and other supporters.  

She is well-known for her award-winning CBC investigative news reporting and currently, regular CBC network radio documentaries. She is also a creative writer, having written an opera libretto and art songs who teaches and guest lectures on storytelling, journalism and decolonization issues at colleges and universities. 

(CLICK ON THE PHOTO accompanying each track to open up each documentary description and to listen to Pamela's award-winning audio stories) Wayi wah!

Pamela Post (Ggol'gm Hana'ack)

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