Step by Step

While he has lived in Montreal for more than three decades, Matthew R. Anderson feels burdened by having come of age in Saskatchewan with an imperfect understanding of the province’s history. He is a self-described settler descendant, raised in Swift Current at a time when the pioneers who had originated in Europe and eastern Canada were celebrated and there was little public discourse about the clashes between the newcomers and the Indigenous people who had lived there for centuries.

Now a Lutheran minister and a theological studies professor, Anderson grew up hearing about homesteaders building communities and breaking soil for commodity farming — but not about the brutally repressive policies that herded First Nations away from their lands and onto confined reserves. “It’s not that the narratives that many of us grew up hearing were always wrong,” he writes in The Good Walk. “But they were incomplete.”

Indigenous culture was not entirely absent...