The Good Walk

Creating New Paths on Traditional Prairie Trails

Matthew R Anderson

• Publisher: University of Regina Press
• Year: 2024
• eBook ISBN:
  9780889779662
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Index: Social Sciences

A motley group’s long trek across the prairies, witnessing the land, reflecting on the past, and creating new paths for the future
 
Equal parts memoir, travelogue, and manifesto, The Good Walk recounts the adventures of settler and Indigenous ramblers who together retrace the earliest historical trails and pathways of the prairies. Readers will share the experience of trekking thousands of kilometres on swollen feet along the Traders' Road, the Battleford Trail, and the Frenchman Trail - prairie paths that haven't been trod for over a century.

The story is steeped in Treaty 4 and Treaty 6 history and is edged with Canadian, nêhiyaw, and Métis stories, politics, and poetry. It braids Indigenous and settler perspectives together along routes increasingly emptied of the family farms and small towns that once defined a province and doesn't shy away from the 1870s and 1880s clearing of the plains nor the 2016 killing of Colton Boushie.

Travel with the group of dreamers who instigated these annual prairie pilgrimages through prairie storms, small-town welcomes, and humorous chance encounters, all while bearing witness to the evolving politics of land ownership and the racialization of access.
 

Table of contents

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• A Thanksgivingby Richard Kotowich
• Introduction: A New Story
• Chapter 1: Walking
• New Paths on Traditional Trails
• For Further Reading
• Old Montreal to Kahnawà:ke
• For Further Reading
• Fibbers and Fabulists
• For Further Reading
• Chapter 2The Traders’ Road, Treaty 4
• Everett Baker and His Posts
• The North West Mounted Police Patrol Trail/Traders’ Road
• Wood Mountain Post
• For Further Reading
• Val Marie to the Whitemud River Valley
• A Spirituality of Unsettling
• A Personal Reconciliation
• Eastend
• To Cypress Lake
• The Frontier Adventure Genre
• Cypress Lake to Fort Walsh
• For Further Reading
• Chapter 3The Fort Battleford Trail, Treaty 6
• New Shoes
• For Further Reading
• Swift Current to Fort Battleford
• The Fort Battleford Trail
• The Landing
• For Further Reading
• Mistahimaskwa (Big Bear)
• The Right of Responsible Access and the Canadian West
• The Bad Hills
• For Further Reading
• Mosquito–Grizzly Bear’s Head–Lean Man First Nation
• Fort Battleford
• Chapter 4More Prairie Trails
• The Good Walk on the Prairies
• Epilogue: The Frenchman’s Trail
• Acknowledgements
• Bibliography
• Archival Sources
• Web Materials
• Books and Articles
• Index