Good Walk, The

The Good Walk: Creating New Paths on Traditional Prairie Trails
by Matthew R. Anderson
Published by University of Regina Press
Review by Shelley A. Leedahl
$27.95 ISBN 9780889779655

Uncanny timing. I recently completed a pilgrimage walk—the 300-kilometer Camino de Santiago (Portuguese Coastal Route)—and not a week after my return from Europe I was reviewing a book about a very different—but much closer to home—set of pilgrimages. The Good Walk: Creating New Paths on Traditional Prairie Trails, by Swift Current-born and raised educator, author and Lutheran minister, Matthew Anderson (who’s also walked the Camino de Santiago), is compelling, exceedingly well-written and researched nonfiction concerning three ambitious Saskatchewan pilgrimages across Treaty 4 and 6 pastures, valleys, roads, ranches and farms, abandoned homesteads, brush belts, villages, First Nations’ reserves and more via the Traders’ Road/NWMP Patrol Trail (2015), the Battleford Trail (2017), and the Frenchman Trail (2018), and creating “healthy new stories” on the journey. “By walking,” Anderson writes, “our group was attempting to pay attention”.

These “good walks” were undertaken by an eclectic assemblage—including clergy, writers, Elders, family members, a hydrologist, naturalist Trevor Herriot, and book dedicatee and Saskatchewan History and Folklore Society president Hugh Henry—to connect to the land and its stories while respecting the First Peoples who walked these trails long before Henry Kelsey set foot on them and Colonialism dealt its calamitous blows. Anderson makes a connection between long-distance walking and decolonization. He writes that Canadians “need to create better narratives about this land and our place, past and present, in it” and to question “the bright and shiny pioneer narratives”.

This mind-expanding book is steeped in empathy for Indigenous Peoples. Anderson writes of broken treaties and the mass starvation of Indigenous Peoples, and includes several quotes from Indigenous and non-Indigenous scholars. Smudging and leaving tobacco were an integral part of these respectful pilgrimages.

Also noteworthy are the numerous poetic descriptions of prairie landscape and weather; anecdotes about group interactions and the hosts; and Anderson’s familial mission: to return a portion of his recently-deceased parents’ remains to the Shaunavon-area, “lonesome little grave” where the author’s infant older sister—whom he’d never met—is buried. Detailing the walk from Wood Mountain to Cypress Hills, Anderson says “gusts … scared up clouds of grasshoppers that would then be caught in the wind and ping off our bodies like flung gravel,” and “antelope zig-zagged away at our approach”.

The skilled weaving of the personal here-and-now (including Anderson’s serious leg infection during the final days of the Frenchman Trail), folklore and recorded—though not necessarily true—history brilliantly steered me through the sizeable book. A shocking revelation for this Saskatchewan-born and raised reader was that during the November 27, 1885 mass hanging in Battleford—eight nêhiyaw and Nakota were executed—Indigenous students from the Battleford Indian Industrial School “were forced to watch the hangings”. All these years later, racism is still prevalent in the province: the 2016 killing of Colten Boushie created a further divide.

This award-worthy book deserves a long slow read. Probably multiple reads. There’s much to take in with each of these prairie pilgrimages, and each “felt holy in its own way”.

THIS BOOK IS AVAILABLE AT YOUR LOCAL BOOKSTORE OR FROM WWW.SKBOOKS.COM