Archie Chantyman will start his 30-day, 700-kilometre, over one million step long journey, the March with Arch, on his birthday, September 5.
This is Chantyman’s third year of walking from Lhoos’kuz Dene (Kluskus) to Saint Joseph’s Mission in Williams Lake, with a tentative stop in Quesnel on September 11 on his way south. After reaching St. Joseph’s, Chantyman will make a return journey back north.
“In the beginning, my idea was to take the garbage off the reservation,” says Chantyman. “Meaning all the stuff that residential school has given to us, imposed on us, or has some way somewhere affected our lives negatively.”
After a couple of nights in Quesnel, Chantyman will continue his journey south. Making stops at Alamo Grill in Kersley, Silver Hall in Alexandria, a night in McCleese Lake, and Westburn Pines before reaching Saint Joseph’s.
“We’re trying to take all that negative stuff off the reservations, and bring it back to the residential school and bury it. When we get there, we’ll call upon the spirits that didn’t make it out of the residential school to walk home with us.”
On his back will be Archie’s ‘Backpack of Burdens’, a backpack that he carries the entire journey there and back again.
“It’s all the garbage, all the negative things that happen to us in residential school,” Chantyman says. “It’s the shame, alcoholism, addiction to drugs, the addiction to violence — the list goes on, my idea is to pack that backpack so it represents the burden of our people to be brought back to residential school. To be laid to rest.”
It is common to see walkers join Archie for some of, or most of, the journey. Archie hopes that if walkers do come, he can reach a new milestone of 30 additional walkers.
“I’m hoping that [the March] touches people’s hearts in a way that could make them change to heal themselves. To start their own way of healing,” Chantyman says. “People will come up to me when we walk and say, ‘thank you for this’, and I say, ‘I didn’t do this, you did. I just opened the gate.’ They did their own healing, and that’s the idea of the March.”
Anyone can donate to the March with Arch through its Facebook page. Donations help contribute to gas, food, and medicine for the volunteers and those who come out for the walk, and to each Indigenous Nation that is visited.
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