Cullen Crozier was always going to be a gifted storyteller, it was in his genes, a talent passed down from his grandfather. He was making deliveries for a living when he discovered the APTN office. It led to a chance encounter that led to an award-winning career as a video journalist. We talk about that, as well as his documentary Against Their Will which documents the resilience of women fighting back against the system that sterilized them.

Last February, APTN News broke the story of racist social media comments by an RCMP officer who posted that Colten Boushie, the 22-year-old Cree man shot and killed by Gerald Stanley, “got what he deserved.”

Trina Roache got the tip from another police officer who was disgusted to see dozens of racist comments about Indigenous people on a Facebook group for RCMP. Trina takes us behind the scenes of that story, and talks about why exposing these stories are important.

Dennis Ward saw it coming. The pipeline, the build-up of tension at Standing Rock in North Dakota, which became an eight-month long stand-off. He convinced the APTN news room to go south-side for what has turned out to be one of the most important stories in US-Indigenous relations this century.

We talk about his pre-APTN career, to his coverage of Standing Rock, including news gathering while being pepper sprayed, and dodging rubber bullets.

Trina Roache has worked at APTN – off and on – since 2001. After returning from an “extended” four-year mat leave in 2013, she saw that the equipment had changed and evolved.

But the Mi’kmaq video journalist wanted that big old Sony camera she was accustomed to using earlier in her career.

“I still have that camera,” she told Karyn Pugliese during her interview for APTN Investigates – a Retrospective, talking about her History Decolonized documentary. “My fingers just know where to go.”

Reflecting on her “long journey” with the company, the talented story teller said “APTN has come so far,” since she started.

According to APTN Investigates journalist Josh Grummet, the most important thing anyone can do in life is listen. So that’s why his Twitter handle is @joshlistens! Another intriguing mystery solved during this conversation with Executive News Director Karyn Pugliese.

He’s the right-hand man to producers on Investigates. A journalist, shooter, editor and creative tour de force with a hand in every episode including his own, Priceless.

Kathleen Martens knows this. She’s proved time and again that government did not fairly compensate survivors and some lawyers fleeced them. She’s broken stories, held those in power accountable, some lawyers were disbarred as a result of her exposés.

Her documentary “Truth? Or Reconciliation” was another deep dive winning the 2017 Canadian Association of Journalists award in the Open Broadcast Feature category with one judge calling it a “perfect” documentary.

Holly Moore was a fine arts student, a dancer and a street performer. Naturally, the next step in her career was to join CBC’s elite investigative unit. Not so obvious?

We talk about how she got from A to B to APTN Today, she is the producer of APTN Investigates, and recently won the Amnesty International Award for Human Right reporting for her work on “The Cure was worse” delving into stories of starvation, isolation, loss of culture and even medical experimentation at Canada’s tuberculosis sanatoriums.

Melissa Ridgen has moved from APTN Investigates to host the APTN talk show InFocus. She’s brought her direct style of inquiry and her predilection for getting to the bottom of things in a Frank way. Not everybody likes that.

We’ll talk to her about how she handles haters. Also, how staring out a window led Ridgen to investigate a good news story, but then it all went wrong.

Veteran reporter Kathleen Marten’s takes us behind the scenes. Matty is non-verbal, suffers from serious disabilities and just aged out of foster care. His foster family wants to keep caring for him, but the state is cutting them off. It’s the kind of noble story reporters want to tell.

However, you can’t just bulldoze your way in. Marten’s talks about trying to strike the balance between getting the images and story a television journalist needs, and while trying not to exploit or harm the vulnerable youth at the centre of the story.

Kathleen Martens has done it all, from covering agricultural stories for a small-town paper in rural Manitoba to taking on the complexities of the federal bureaucracy, not to mention just about the entire legal profession. First in local print and then in long form TV investigations for a national audience and now on the APTN National News web site, there’s not much Kathleen Martens hasn’t done in the world of journalism. And by bringing a handful of national awards to APTN Investigates, the evidence is clearly there that she’s done it very well.

Karyn Pugliese and Kathleen Martens discuss the Independent Assessment Process and so much more on APTN Investigates: A Retrospective.