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Canadians (outside Quebec) are heirs to the British system of common law. Parallel to the British experience, there also existed in Canada a population that freely hunted, fished, and traversed territory they considered a “commons.”

But in a series of events not entirely dissimilar from the violent enclosures in England, Scotland, and Ireland, the historic denizens came to be considered undesirable to landowners embracing new forms of market economy. They were forced from their homes through starvation and by outright acts of bloodshed and terror, expulsions sanctioned by courts and reinforced by acts of Parliament.

Hiking a Lakota warrior path

In 2015, together with Prairie historian Hugh Henry, I walked the 350-kilometre North-West Mounted Police Patrol Trail from Wood Mountain to Cypress Hills, Sask. The 19th-century trail was used by Lakota warriors. James Morrow Walsh of the NWMP rode the trail more often than anyone before or since, as he tried unsuccessfully to get his superiors to accept Sitting Bull’s stay north of the “Medicine Line”.

In 2017, we walked the Swift Current to Battleford Trail, used by Metis traders, Big Bear, and Col. William Otter and his troops in the 1870s and ’80s. We crossed land near where Colton Boushie had been shot by Gerald Stanley only the year before our walk.

Our group included First Nations and Metis hikers, and the Catholic archbishop of Saskatchewan. Again we were led by Hugh Henry of the Saskatchewan History and Folklore Society and walked with the permission of local land-owners.