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Archer Book Club: November 2024

Welcome to the Archer Book Club, or the ABC!

Selection Of The Month

From U of R Press 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.

Zoom Meeting Information

Zoom information will be provided closer to the planned meeting: 12:00pm-1:00pm, November 27th, 2024.

Discussion Questions

  1. Why do you think the practice of pilgrimage has been largely ignored and forgotten on the Canadian Prairies? Do you think there is a space or need for pilgrimage in our modern world
  2. Anderson speaks of the restorative, therapeutic and engaging aspects of walking. He suggests that making pilgrimages on trails, normally driven or ignored, may help prairie settlers reconnect with the land in a different way. Do you agree? Do you have any personal experience with this?
  3. What role does private ownership affect the freedom of travel and exploration? Are land-owners justified from excluding people from property? Does anything change if there is a historic trail or other site of importance? Why or why not?
  4. Why do you think the Canadian prairies are so often regarded as a spiritual place in literature? Do the prairies hold any personal spiritual connections or experience for you?
  5. Anderson speaks of the need to reconcile colonial history with the truth that has only recently come to light about Canada’s Indigenous people. What are your experiences re-learning Canadian history from a place of decolonization?
  6. Anderson tells readers that “we Canadian have to be content being uncomfortable and unsettled…” (213) and we need to spend more time feeling an “unhomesness” on the land. What does “unhomeness” look like and how do we, as Canadians, begin this process? Do you have any personal experiences with this feeling?
  7. The goal for the book was that readers be taken “on the road” to some new insights and will gain a new perspective. Do you think the book accomplished this goal?