Tag: NWMP Trail

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Like Being There

Matthew hiding out

Matthew seeking guidance
Matthew Seeking Guidance

See this stuffed prairie dog? Apparently, it has a name: “Matthew”. I just received photos of this mascot all along the route of the Humboldt-Fort Carleton Trail Walk in 2019. Each of them with cute little captions. In 2015,  Hugh Henry and I began this tradition by trekking the 350-km Traders’ Road, or North-West Mounted Police Patrol Trail (NWMPT) in Treaty 4 Territory, SW Sask. It was likely the first time the trail had been walked in over a century.

Matthew in the bull's eye
“Matthew in the Bull’s Eye”

In 2017 we walked the Swift Current to Battleford Trail, another 350 km; near Battleford there were lots of issues with access and trespassing (see above). In 2018 we walked the Frenchman’s Trail, from Mortlach to Gravelbourg. I was surprised that there was a Welsh couple serving Fish’n’Chips in Mortlach (see photo below).

Matthew passed out
Matthew Passed Out

This year, Hugh and the Saskatchewan History and Folklore Society (SHFS) planned a journey from Humboldt to Fort Carleton. I’m still in England; this was the first year I just couldn’t make it. No country bars and pool-tables for me this August. But apparently I was there in spirit.

Matthew rack-em
Rack-em Up Matthew

If you’d like to read more about the walk they took – without me – you can read a great day-by-day description (I did) on Ken Wilson’s blog at https://readingandwalking.wordpress.com/.

Matthew medical distress
Matthew: medical distress

The photo I found the funniest is just above. I had quite a bit of foot trouble on the way to Battleford in 2017, culminating in a full-on leg infection. I was using duct-tape for my blisters, in the vain hope it can fix EVERY problem! Live and learn! Mostly, I’m thankful for good friends and for being remembered on a pilgrimage I couldn’t walk. They knew I was thinking about them. And how wonderful, to be thought of in return.

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Anticipating Walking

Matt and Rick by NWMP trail post Pinto Butte July 23
Richard Kotowich and I walking near Pinto Horse Butte, 2015 (photo by Marshall Drummond)

For years I dreamt of walking Treaty Four territories, what is now south-west Saskatchewan. Only in 2013-2014 did I find a trail (the Traders’ Road, or North-West Mounted Police Patrol Trail), a guide and fellow walker (Hugh Henry, of the SK History and Folklore Society), and feel in my bones a reason (un-settling Settler narratives) to make it finally happen. Ken Wilson is also interested in Settler preparation for reconciliation; he and I walked together from Swift Current to Battleford in 2017 and from Mortlach to Gravelbourg in 2018. Ken recently set his scholarly lens on an article I wrote for a volume in pilgrimage back in 2013, just before that first 350-km journey across the prairies. A serious academic, Ken has highlighted the article’s best parts. In case you’re interested, I’m posting his post, here:

https://readingandwalking.wordpress.com/2019/05/17/46-ian-s-mcintosh-e-moore-quinn-and-vivienne-keely-eds-pilgrimage-in-practice-narration-reclamation-and-healing/?fbclid=IwAR32NXXowAOTwQbyvGVJ448lhAfaYuy8vqlsgZKVlkGnYLS1dDI9QcjmbLE

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Walking and Owning

Walking focuses not on the boundary lines of ownership that break the land into pieces but on the paths that function as a kind of circulatory system connecting the whole organism. Walking is, in this way, the antithesis of owning. (Solnit, Wanderlust, 162)

sorry kiosk closed HayfieldI’d counted on getting my bearings from the Hayfield UK info stop. I had to think again! On April 24 1932, after decades of on-again, off-again confrontations, 400 members of the British Workers Sports Federation started trekking up from their campsites here toward “the forbidden mountain.” The mass trespass of Kinder Scout plateau’s private land became the tipping point in the fight for the right to walking access across private lands. This plaque commemorating the walkers is affixed to the wall of an old stone quarry at the head of the trail. No one is fighting for the right to walk across Saskatchewan. There are no walkers’ groups, no mass rambling movement and no one in Swift Current or Saskatoon is trying to escape the grimy factory life of Sheffield and Manchester in the early 20th century. But there ARE historic, important trails across the prairie. They also deserve public access. And Canada has an important issue that the 1930s British ramblers never faced – the question of Indigenous access. quarry plaque one

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A Five-Minute Cooks’ Tour

2016-07-21-11-19-38

on the subject of – what else? – western Christian pilgrimage (clink on the following link) https://vimeo.com/183303404

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Crossing the Line

clouds and direction sign over SC SK

“Well, you know, it’s just across the Line,” my aunt said to me, about a town in North Dakota that my cousins were visiting. I haven’t heard that word for a while. In Montreal they don’t use it. But I grew up in Saskatchewan hearing it. “The Line”. Do you know where that word for the US border comes from, I asked my aunt? “No idea,” she answered.

Today is national aboriginal day. The 20th such day, and the first since the Truth and Reconciliation Commission issued its recommendations. Though it’s a small thing, one of the things we who are Settlers can do to mark this day is to remember where some of our words come from. They’re signs of a history willfully forgotten.

I grew up in Treaty Four land – except there were no “Indians”. The First Nations were, for me, like the ancient Egyptians: important people no longer around. What I DIDN’T know, because it wasn’t in my schoolbooks or taught in my classes, or talked about by my parents or grandparents, was that the original inhabitants had only been gone 85 years or so when I was born. The big secret I learned only years later was that they had been pushed off the land they had just signed title to, to make way for people like my grandparents and me.

Using the word “The Line” for the border is a relic of the days not so long ago when the 49th parallel was called “The Medicine Line” by the First Nations, especially the Lakota. They could cross it and the American Army, who were fighting a vicious battle with them south of the border, would not follow. This was good medicine, and at the time, the Canadian government was generally respected for such protection. Soon enough, our government starved the Lakota back south, and pushed the so-called ‘Canadian Indians’ north by starvation, an intentional policy to make an “Indian-free” land-belt for the railroad and its Settlers.

When we say “the Line” for the border, we echo those days. Even better, then: let us actually remember them – with honesty, apology, and intent to make good what was wrongly done.

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And I Have Felt a Presence

2015-07-26 10.57.57

For I have learned

To look on nature, not as in the hour

Of thoughtless youth; but hearing oftentimes

The still, sad music of humanity,

Nor harsh nor grating, though of ample power

To chasten and subdue. And I have felt

A presence that disturbs me with the joy

Of elevated thoughts; a sense sublime

Of something far more deeply interfused,

Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns,

And the round ocean and the living air,

And the blue sky, and in the mind of man

 

(William Wordsworth, Tintern Abbey, July 13, 1798)

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Far from One’s Earthly Home

(this is a guest blog posting on postmodernism and pilgrimage, by Sara Terreault, my friend and pilgrimage studies colleague. Her thoughts were inspired by the questions and comments posed by another of our friends and colleagues, E. Moore Quinn. Their back-and-forth conversation was too good, and too detailed, to leave in the comments section!  MA)

Hi Eileen,

Fancy meeting you here: do you come here often? 🙂

Great questions.  I should be grading papers but cannot resist jumping in.  Here goes, a few note-form thoughts in response to your thoughts:

1) “postmodernism (cultural orientation)/postmodernity (historical time period)”: well, literally “after modernism/modernity”.  So applies to cultures that have been shaped by modernism (or in short, the so-called “Enlightenment Project”), but have grown suspicious of modernist assumptions and values, so

1a) Enlightenment Project, a meta-culture (birthing the so-called universalist  “metanarrative”) consisting of : i) anthropology: human person as primarily (or ideally) interior, individual, rational, and, once freed from the tutelage of superstition (incl “religion”) capable of solving all human issues by exercise of rationality); ii) epistemology: rational, objectivist empiricism, privileges scientific method;  iii) ontology: materialist, immanentist.  Implications: the eclipse of the transcendent, the spiritual/religious, the affective.
1b) Romanticism (late 18/early 19th c.) a reaction/response to the hyper-rationalism of the Enlightenment, but which nonetheless retains the individualist interiority of Enlightenment anthropology … however privileges affectivity, intuition, arts and artists, rather than empiricist rationality and science.  Romanticism has an ambiguous relationship to “religion” and I think we can see there the roots of the contemporary postmodern “spiritual but not religious” (re-opens the door to the re-entry of transcendent reality, but not through traditional “religion”).
1c) Finally: postmodernism: disparate cultural movements that have challenged the assumptions and values of the Enlightenment  and  to some degree Romanticism.  It is paradoxically both hyper-modern and anti-modern.
1d) postmodernity: When is this? This will be endlessly debated, but it makes sense to me to place this post WW2, when all the certainties of modern hopefulness in humans and their “brave new world” lay in ruins after the horrors of two world wars, genocide, totalitarianism, atomic weaponry: our lovely individualist, scientific rationalism has *not* saved us after all. Now what?  Western (modernist) culture fragments into many small cultures (mini narratives) privileging the local, the plural, the diverse, the contingent, the social
2) Shrines, relics, pilgrimage and postmodernity: I’ll suggest that the “shrine” is the in-dwelling place of the divine, “relics” are the meaning-imbued and empowered material memory of the holy one (saint) and the holy experience (in this case, pilgrimage); and “pilgrimage” is physical (or in some cases only spiritual) journey for and to self-transcendence.
2a)  i. The shrine may indeed be spatially located, architecturally realised.  But it is also (at least in Christian tradition) interior, spiritual and personal: “You are the temple of the Holy Spirit” (1 Corinthians).  For postmodern people, the secularity of modernity means that attachment to and experience of traditional religion is often thin or very thin.  Yet the desire for and valuing of the transcendent is nonetheless strong, but is expressed largely privately (religion having been banished from the public square).  So the interior understanding of shrine is “natural” to us postmoderns (we are perhaps just a little bit gnostic in our tendencies …).  We may structure our spirituality on aspects (and in the case of pilgrimage), on locations of traditional religions) but we do this largely individually, partially, and with great focus on interiority. ii. peregrini:  I totally agree that postmodern pilgrimage’s “interior shrine” is in many ways like that of the Celtic peregrini pro Christo whose pilgrim journeys were not toward any wrldly centre, that is toward any spatially/materially located shrine, but rather away from the “centre” of the earthly home, familiarity, comfort etc. Their “destination” is not spatial/material/earthly but rather eschatological, and their only earthly material shrine is their own pilgrim bodies. iii) Relics: the material and sacramental traces of holy people, places, memories.  Not a long way from a strand of hair in a locket, or a pilgrim badge or tattoo, or a burden stone to be left on the road, or a postcard or souvenir …
Your further thoughts?

 

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Interview with Cristina

A wide range of thoughts on pilgrimage, from the way space creates thought, to an Australian nun’s summons to a new field.

https://vimeo.com/145929829

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Reconnecting with Land article

buffalo wallow rock

Clink on the link below for the article that will appear tomorrow (Aug 28 2015) in the Prairie Post. Thanks to Matthew Liebenberg for his questions and writing!

Prairie Post Aug 28 2015

Hugh magnified by valley

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Un pèlerin des temps modernes retrace les pas de ses ancêtres

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You can find here the radio broadcast of my interview with Radio-Canada, in French, as well as a photo essay by William Burr, also in French, about the trail and our pilgrimage.

http://ici.radio-canada.ca/emissions/pour_faire_un_monde/2014-2015/chronique.asp?idChronique=380260