The Good Walk: Creating New Paths on Traditional Prairie Trails (University of Regina Press, 2024) by Dr. Matthew Anderson, the Father Edo Gatto Chair of Christian Studies in the StFX Department of Religious Studies, has won a Saskatchewan Book Award. The 14 winners of this highest literary honour in the province of Saskatchewan were announced May 9 in Saskatoon.
Dr. Matthew Anderson
The Good Walk is described as equal parts memoir, travelogue, and manifesto, as it recounts the adventures of settler and Indigenous ramblers who together retrace the earliest historical trails and pathways of the prairies.
Dr. Anderson instigated these long-distance prairie walks with the support of the Saskatchewan History and Folklore Society in 2015 to draw attention to almost-forgotten routes that hold historical and ongoing importance for settler-Indigenous relations, such as the Traders' Road, the Battleford Trail, and the Frenchman Trail. With Indigenous guidance, he says decolonization and learning about the land and its long Indigenous history is an important part of the book.
Dr. Anderson is a scholar of pilgrimage, Biblical Studies, and decolonizing approaches to both. He has walked and led educational pilgrimages on historic paths around the world, such as the St. Olaf Way in Norway and Baer to Skalholt in Iceland, as well as the famous Camino de Santiago, about which he made a documentary film. But he says he is "most interested in the pilgrimages that begin when you step outside your own front door."
Dr. Anderson says this could be why, when pilgrimages were scarce or nonexistent here at home in Canada, that he began creating them including the ones that led to him writing The Good Walk. In addition to the Western Canadian walks, he also developed a three-day educational walk from Old Montreal to Kahnawà:ke Mohawk Territory (under the guidance of local Mohawk elders) for his pilgrimage students at Concordia University. When he moved to Nova Scotia in 2022, he guided themed regional walks around the province as Director of Camino Nova Scotia. Last year, he organized the "Nova Scotia Ninian Way" from Pomquet to Antigonish, just in time for walkers to receive a "pilgrim blessing" at the closing mass for St. Ninian Cathedral's 150th Anniversary celebrations. This local walk also resulted in a book, Someone Else's Saint: How a Scottish Pilgrimage led to Nova Scotia (Pottersfield 2025). It came about after Dr. Anderson's 2024 Gatto Lecture "The Mystery of Ninian" at the Antigonish Heritage Museum left him with so much extra research it blossomed into a manuscript. He entered it in the Pottersfield Prize for Unpublished Non-fiction and it won second place. This latest book was launched at the museum. The Religious Studies Department plans to celebrate it and other new faculty publications in Fall 2025.
When asked how his fascination with intentional long-distance walking began, Dr. Anderson says it was happy accident. His PhD is in New Testament. When he first started teaching part-time in Concordia University's Department of Theological Studies over 20 years ago, pilgrimage was a word he'd barely heard of. But his teaching and research horizons were about to expand. "Early on," he explains, "our then department head Pamela Bright informed me (notice I didn't say asked'!) that I was to take a group of students to Spain to walk the Camino de Santiago and that I'd subsequently be developing a new pilgrimage studies course."
Dr. Anderson admits, "to be honest, I was slightly annoyed. I seemed to have no choice in the matter. My training was in Hellenistic and Roman Judaism and Christianity. But the old adage that the Camino is life-changing came true for me as well. In my case, it was less the stereotypical spiritual awakening, and more the academic side of pilgrimage that altered my trajectory. For one thing, the ways that academics analyzed the Camino were more relevant than I expected to my studies of the ancient Mediterranean. We often forget that ancient Judaism was a pilgrimage religion, or that shrine pilgrimage played a significant role in the development of early Christianity. But apart from that, and most importantly for The Good Walk, something bothered me: why was it necessary for a class full of Canadian students to fly all the way to Europe to learn about pilgrimage? At the time, I was starting to develop the interpretive approach I've since come to refer to as Aware Settler.' If one definition of pilgrimage is travel for transformation,' then why couldn't it happen at home? And why couldn't pilgrimage be an act of decolonizing?"
While Dr. Anderson has written a variety of books, many about walking and/or decolonizing in one way or another, The Good Walk is particularly special for him. He considers it a culmination of both his academic studies on theorized walking and settler colonialism, and his reflections on the lived experience of walking Treaty 4 and Treaty 6 Land as a descendent of those who settled it. Born and raised in Saskatchewan, he remembers as a university student working on a telephone crew where he spent six days a week out walking on the land. He also walked quite a bit with his father. These early experiences helped develop his love his walking.
Dr. Anderson says he was heartened by its warm reception when he toured with the book in May 2024 and found that people were showing up to the launches already having read it and found it transformational. He was further encouraged by a number of positive reviews that urged all settler Canadians, not only Westerners, to read it. The Miramichi Reader also chose it as one of their best non-fiction books of the year for 2024.
He calls this Saskatchewan Book Award a "wildest dream come true." Locally, the book can be found at The Curious Cat.
Dr. Anderson arrived at StFX in 2022 when his spouse, Dr. Sara Parks became assistant professor in the Department of Religious Studies.
Some reviews of The Good Walk:
From The Miramichi Reader: https://miramichireader.ca/2024/11/the-good-walk-creating-new-paths-on-traditional-prairie-trails-by-matthew-r-anderson/
From Your West Central Voice: https://www.yourwestcentral.com/articles/book-the-good-walk-creating-new-paths-on-traditional-prairie-trails
From Foreword Reviews: https://www.forewordreviews.com/reviews/the-good-walk/
Some articles about the 2025 Saskatchewan Book Awards:
Quill and Quire: https://quillandquire.com/omni/2025-saskatchewan-book-award-winners-announced/
Sask Today: https://www.sasktoday.ca/regina-today/regina-news/u-of-r-press-wins-big-at-sask-book-awards-with-three-celebrated-titles-10696673
