The Good Walk

A motley group’s long trek across the prairies, witnessing the land, reflecting on the past, and creating new paths for the future

The Good Walk is a memoir, travelogue, and manifesto, recounting how a growing group of dreamers instigated prairie pilgrimages on foot, starting in 2015 and continuing almost every year since. The story is steeped in Treaty Four and Treaty Six history and edged with Canadian, nêhiyaw, and Métis stories and poetry. It braids Indigenous perspectives together with rural Saskatchewan characters along routes increasingly emptied of the family farms and small towns that once defined a province. It doesn’t shy away from the clearing of the plains in the 1870s and 1880s nor the 2016 killing of Colton Boushie that again separated the rural communities from the Indigenous communities. Travel with the author through prairie storms, family histories, and humorous encounters, and bear difficult witness to the evolving politics of ownership and of racialized land access.

Readers will share the real-life adventures of a group of Indigenous and settler walkers, trekking thousands of kilometres on swollen feet along the Traders’ Road, the Battleford Trail, the Frenchman and the Fort Qu’Appelle Trails--prairie paths that haven’t been walked in over a century.

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.