Stories with David Scott - A Jarring Memory.

Dave passes on his knowledge to his students in the forests of the Tinker Creek valley.

David Scott

An oral story recording turned to text. 2026-05-03

(Dave)

Finn and I were sitting on the deck this evening reading a book about birds and the loss of them. This triggered a memory of mine about my life on the reserve as a kid.

I remember seeing birds dead in the ditches when I was younger. I was playing along the ditch of what we now called Beaverdam Road, and I remember seeing birds that were dead along that area- ducks, hawks, different species of birds. There was no obvious reason for them dying like that, and I was concerned.

I came home that evening and told my dad about what I saw. He said to me right away - "Don't play in those ditches. They're spraying something in there. We don't know what they are putting there." I said "well, why are they killing birds?" And my dad told me: "They don't care for things like that. The crops that they're going to bring need those chemicals that they're putting in there."

I didn't know until later on about what the Noxious Weed Control Program through the Indian Act was all about until the 70s. These were the 60s when I was still a kid playing around in the places where we would normally play and then was stopped from being in those areas. When my dad warned us about that, I asked: "if it's going to harm those birds, isn't it going to harm us?" My dad replied "Yes, but that doesn't matter to them. We're not human beings to them. We just have to be cautious on the things that they're doing to us. All they care about is money. Don't go where you shouldn't go. Stay in the bushes and forests."

But I started noticing in the 70s that a lot of our old people started to die off. All my old teachers, many died in the 1970s and 80s. I don't know why they died, I just put it to them being old people. They just all of a sudden passed away - healthy, healthy old people. They used to live into their late 90s.

All of a sudden, as these people were living into their 70s and dying off, I didn't make the connection until later on that some of the diseases that our people are getting now have to do with chemical use on the lands that we live on and maybe the food they were eating. Maybe that's why Swan Lake people have never been farmers. We didn't like it because of the way they (outside communities) farmed.

So those were our problems. But my memories of that time was of being afraid - afraid of that environment that I loved so much to be in. So I used to go into the valley and stay in the deep forest and I didn't play too much in agricultural areas. Even to walk through a field was something that I learned later on not to do, as I used to play in wheat fields and other crops that were near our house. We used to go and hide in there and play, and would come out with really serious rashes and were told not to do that anymore - not to play in those fields that they're spraying chemicals in and that we don't know how those things are going to affect us. We always were concerned about these new things on our land that we didn't know the consequences of. With all these things changing, the lives we used to understand were becoming unpredictable.

It wasn't until the late 80s that we started noticing people, and mostly younger people, were starting to get cancers, many different kinds of cancers, which is strange for us because we never had those diseases before. First time we ever seen a cancer was back in the 40s when my grandfather was ordered to go in and find out what was killing a lady that came here for healing. Him and the other old people described it as a parasite, as we did not have a word for that kind of disease. My grandfather came out and said "It's not our disease. It's a worm eating us from the inside" (in Ojibwe).

That was the first warning sign for the people of my dad's age and my mom and my grandparents that something was coming our way that we don't understand and that we don't have medicines for. I didn't think about it at that time when I heard that story of life in the 40s. I think about it now - why did those old people tell us that story? It was a story, I know now that I'm older, about caution and warning us about some of the things that were coming and that we may not understand. That's why we were and are afraid of our own environment in those times and still are.

The stubborn guy that I am, I said, "I'm going to go and play anyway. I'm going to go in those forests and in those grasslands where I belong. I'm going to go there." And my dad used to get mad at me and told me not to do that.

My grandfather died in 1965. He was over 100 years old, and was a woodsman his whole life. From all accounts of him, he was healthy. But he was the one that sent out the warnings about these things that the white man was going to do to us and about the Crown and what they suspected about the reserve being a testing ground. It wasn't until the 80s when I started reading documents that these reserves were testing grounds under the Noxious Weed Control Program for chemicals. That program eventually just faded away without too much comment, and we've had to live with the consequence.

A view of Swan Lake from the corner of the reserve. The farmers of this area had close relationships and frequently helped the community.

The Community Pushes Back

I frequently talk about the document that I analyzed for the Chief back in 1976. It was a document about why the Indian Act as a law in Canada had to be directed by the Department of Indian Affairs and how the department of Indian Affairs was going to force us to capitulate to their laws.

The chief told me, "I want to fight this. Can you read this document?" So I read it and understood it, being well-read at the time, and I had seen the paternalism that was there and the colonialistic thinking. And even in that time, it seemed like we were not humans in their actions, even after the 1960 Amendment to the Indian Act that said we were. I started studying up on those legal documents, and we later went in and met the Indian Affairs agents. They said that they were implementing a different version of the agricultural loan systems on Indian reserves because we didn't have collateral for loans directly from banks - we didn't actually own anything according to them. It was the government that had to lend to us and this program and, in the legal language of those papers, was about financially bankrupting the reserve so that they can sell the land out from under us.

That's the document that I read when the chief asked me to analyze it, and I formulated the arguments that we should first start from the point that regardless of what the Indian Act says, we are human beings and that the loans that they were lending us were about bankrupting us. I was spot on in that analysis.

We started that fight, the chief and council of Swan Lake back in those days. That's when we started standing up and fighting for our rights and saying to "hell with you guys, we're going to do what we want. We don't need your money." So we did, and we made deals with farmers near us. We would buy cattle directly from them, one or two at a time. We even had a breeding program with some of our neighbors with our cattle. We had allies all around our community that helped us feed our families in many different ways.

We had many angry encounters with Indian Affairs in that time. They would come talk to us, and when we would fight back, they would try to talk over us with bigger and complicated English words. I was taught not to talk back to older people as a young man, it was part of respect in my culture. One day when the Indian Agent began using those big words, the chief Roy nudged me and told me to respond. I said "Aniin boozhins nagudoodapinamag gidoon science". All I said was "has the cat got your tongue science". He looked around at his papers as if the words were coming out of them. I said after a waiting awhile "you come in here as if we aren't going to answer you back. It's time that we did answer you back."

Roy nudged me again and said: "You've got a job".

And then I remember in 1978, the Department of Indian Affairs, through the Indian Agricultural Program, which became known as the Manitoba Indian Agricultural Program, came and asked us where we got these animals from. I remember the chief Roy slapped that Indian Affairs guy that time, slapped him right across the face. "Get off the reserve, we don't need you here. It's none of your business where we got our animals from" the chief said. That's when we started saying no to the Indian Act. Since then this reserve has always been that way. We've always said no to the Indian Act in any way we can, and became known as "that troublesome band of Indians".

But at some time they started responding "okay, you're not going to get education funding. You're not going to get all these different fundings unless you capitulate to the Department of Indian Affairs' rules." So we said, "no, we're not going to. Go ahead, cut us off if you want. We'll make it public that what you guys are doing is because we have our own cattle that we raised, which is our property, not the Queen's." In that sense, we humiliated them. Because at that time, Section 35 of the Indian Act was still in place - "No white man can trespass on Indian land." They still had to hide what they were doing to Indians back in those days.

And we were breaking that seal. We were breaking that wide open and letting people know what was happening.

And I know Roy believed in Obehmaatizee, that we are all human beings regardless of our skin color. That's why he did what he did. He brought us out of the darkness of the Indian Act, and we started standing up on our own two feet. Indian Affairs didn't like that. They didn't like that we were doing things on our own without their permission. They were mad because the land we were on was "the Queen's property" and we needed permission to do what we needed to do on that land. It didn't belong to us according to them.

So they can cut us off of funding and any other way that they can punish us. But they did not want the public to know what they were doing. And that's what we threatened to fight by telling everybody. Our chief's thinking was, "let's fight the Indian Agents. Let's tell our story and humiliate them for what they do to us." And that's what we did - that's when we began to fight back.

I know the neighbors around us used to yell and scream at government people with us at the same time and that we supported one another. Somewhere along the way, that changed. We became divided along racial lines again.

I was put on a path of building bridges with our white neighbors because an old man said at one of our community meetings asked a simple question: "Where are the voices of our white brothers? We don't hear them in our halls anymore." That set me on my journey to build bridges. It was then that I started working to rebuild our relationships with those outside communities that were our allies. We don't want to live the segregation that has happened because of history. How were we supposed to take care of the land if we didn't talk to each other?

I still deal with racism in our area, even with some of our own people. I have to spend lots of my time taking the Indian Act out of our people, and many of our leaders still think in that way. My job as an older person is to teach and pass on knowledge to the younger generations. That why I started our program with 4 indigenous and 4 non-indigenous people to share my knowledge about our plants and animals and rebuild those relationships. The environment is a neutral subject that affects us all, and I will be pushing up daisies before the worst of climate change hits us. These things affect us regardless of what skin color you have or who you pray to, and that's important to me that the young people know that.

I see these changes in the environment as an old man and remember the stories the old people told me about what was going to happen. The success of this program that I teach has shown how each young person can build relationships and see each other and the environment in a new way, one that bring us closer to how our relationship with each others' communities should have been. Continuing down this path will lead us to what was meant by treaty - to share knowledge, share the land, and find ways to live together and with the environment in this place we call home. That's my work.