The Good Walk: Creating New Paths on Traditional Prairie Trails by Matthew R. Anderson

What a fantastic and important book.

This is a remarkable book about a remarkable — and ongoing — project. The author is a professor of religious studies in Nova Scotia and Quebec, who grew up in Saskatchewan. One of his specialties is pilgrimages, which have a long Christian tradition.

Around the time the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada was finalizing its report — and asking Canadians to rethink their relationship with Indigenous communities and the legacy of Residential Schools in this country, Anderson was struck by how all the examples of pilgrimages he studied were in Europe. He knew there were trails in Saskatchewan, which had been useful to the pioneers, but he also knew those trails followed the routes Indigenous people had been walking for thousands of years.

Anderson worked with colleagues – and new connections, notably Hugh Henry, president of the Folklore Society – to organize a walk in 2015 from Wood Mountain to Fort Walsh, then another in 2017 from Swift Current to Fort Battleford. The Good Walk provides a record of these walks, but it is also so much more. The book is heavily footnoted and stuffed with references to a broad research base of Indigenous studies and the latest in decolonial history making. Want a place to start Indigenizing your understanding of this country? This is a terrific launching pad for years and years of reading.

As readers follow Anderson and his fellow walkers, which at one point included the poet of unlimited gifts, Sky Dancer Louise Bernice Halfe, they confront layers of history. For thousands of years, walking was how one traversed the prairie and life continued in cycles, but in the last 200 years a new pattern has taken hold. The prairie peoples were confronted with an Imperial power intent on removing them.

The old trails took on new meanings, and the ripples of that change continue to the present day. The 2017 walk passed close to the farm where Gerald Stanley, white farmer, killed Colten Boushie, a 22-year-old Cree man, in 2016. No Trespassing signs filled the area, and tension between the white and Indigenous communities was high. As it was in the 1880s, when the Riel Rebellion brought the army to the prairie, regiments that walked the same trail that Anderson and his colleagues took.

It is safe to say that Anderson has corrected his blindness of Indigenous historical presence of the land of his childhood – and taken strong steps towards sharing that knowledge in both lived out ways on the trail and in this book. Here is a story that deserves many readers – and many new trail walkers.

What a fantastic and important book.

Matthew R. Anderson was born to settlers on Treaty 4 territory near the Cypress Hills area. He now teaches part-time at both St. Francis Xavier and Concordia universities. Anderson is the author of several books, including Our Home and Treaty Land (with Raymond Aldred). His pilgrimage podcast is “Pilgrimage Stories from Up and Down the Staircase,” and more of his work can be found at SomethingGrand.ca and UnsettledWords.com.

Publisher: University of Regina Press (April 27, 2024)
Paperback 8″ x 5″ | 356 pages
ISBN: 9780889779655

Michael Bryson

Michael Bryson has been reviewing books since the 1990s in publications such as The Kitchener-Waterloo Record, Paragraph Magazine, Id Magazine, and Quill & Quire. His short story collections include Thirteen Shades of Black and White (1999) and The Lizard and Other Stories (2009). His fiction has appeared in Best Canadian Stories and other anthologies. His story Survival is available as a Kindle single. From 1999-2018, he oversaw 78 issues of fiction, poetry, reviews, author interviews, essays, and other features at The Danforth Review. He lives in Scarborough, Ontario, and blogs at Art/Life: Scribblings.