In 1867, sixteen-year-old Métis Emile returns to Red River after years confined to the Collège de Montréal, putting him on a path to become a priest. Quiet and devout, Emile comes face to face with his long-estranged twin brother, Nimki, who is everything Emile is not: charismatic, impulsive, and widely admired as a fiddler with a deep knowledge of the land, but whose drinking and restlessness undermine him. The two were raised separately by powerful grandmothers after their mother died in childbirth.

When a British doctor arrives with a Viscount in Red River seeking guides for Canada’s first tourist expedition, Nimki and Emile volunteer. This launches a grueling westward journey that changes their lives forever, beginning with near starvation, a sudden death, and the petty cruelties of the British tourists. When the British patrons abandon the brothers, they are left to fend for themselves on the western side of the mountains. Emile and Nimki become ranch hands at Kingscote, a ranch owned by Francis Woodbourne, an upper class British immigrant, magistrate, and future politician who is intent on building his own small empire, including the appropriation of Indigenous lands. After Woodbourne entrusts Emile with an expedition designed to reduce reserve lands, Emile struggles with the realization that he is complicit in acts that violate the rights of Indigenous people.

At Kingscote, the brothers meet Delia, a courageous and risk‑taking Nlaka’pamux teenager resisting the structures meant to contain her, and Sam, the ranch’s steadfast, forty‑something Chinese cook whose calm authority and quiet care make him an uncle‑like presence in their lives. Linked by shared marginalization and a growing distrust of Woodbourne’s authority, the three youths form a tentative but powerful bond.

When Emile, Nimki and Delia are forced to flee the ranch, their journey takes them further into the world of marginalized communities in the west, and even to the United States for a ragged Wild West show in Montana, where they perform caricatured versions of themselves for white audiences. As Nimki, Emile and Delia change and grow with their experiences, they carry with them new questions about what it means to belong, to resist, and to shoulder the responsibilities facing Indigenous nations.

The expedition and the ranch are real; the twins and Delia are fictional. Further West reveals history from a non-white perspective.