The Changing of the Weather - Global Warming and Oral Histories

Written by David Scott and Finn Rachul

2026-10-06

2026 has been an intense year for weather both locally and worldwide. For Manitoba, we've seen rain in winter, dust storms in spring, and flooding in summer. As my training with Dave has progressed, we've spent long conversations talking about weather - what it once was, and how different it has become in a lifetime. Dave carries the oral histories of past generations, many of which talk about the behavior of the landscape in those old times of more consistent weather. It is hard to find a single place that hasn't been affected by the recurring intensity of storms or heat, and we see it in the land in our work every day.

The Oral Histories of Climate

In the Ojibwe value system, there is no hierarchy of life. We've talked about this in the context of Obehmaatizee, and how humans are as important as all other living things. This extends to bigger environmental subjects, where a weather front is no more important than the land it travels over. The land feeds the clouds, and the clouds feed the land, further cementing the importance of humans and animals as maintainers of the ecosystems that interact with the atmosphere.

Ojibwe people and Indigenous peoples everywhere knowingly took responsibility for these systems, and they reaped the benefits in everyday ways. As Dave tells me, on many of the days he returned home from school, his grandmother would be waiting for him to help her harvest wild plants. Sometimes, these harvesting sessions would take whole evenings, especially when the weather conditions and plant behavior were perfect and a certain plant was ideal for a highly specific use. While the Ojibwe never used a calendar year - their 6 season calendar was flexible to varying ecological shifts - these short windows for harvesting plants, mushrooms, and animals and the multi-year cycles they operated on were relatively consistent. Their diet was diverse and nutritious, with seasonal foods as diverse as nut butters, insects, birds, wild meats, fish, wild starch foods, and much more.

This consistency of weather even appears in the language. Ojibwe words of clouds had highly descriptive meanings, southern storm fronts were relied upon for nourishing the landscape, western storms were closely watched for wind and hail, and northern storms were known to bring cool weather and moisture. With language being closely tied to day to day semi-nomadic life on the land, being able to predict coming weather patterns was a built in feature of the Ojibwe language and a skill specific people of their communities mastered.

Likewise, the connection between these weather patterns and intricate plant behavior was understood and looked after by specific individuals, who would pass their knowledge on to younger people with the right mindset. These behaviors, such as heat causing plant blooms, humidity triggering mushroom fruiting, or cool temperatures stunting growth, were relatively consistent in that when one weather event happened, it was expected that living things would react a certain way. With each stage, the community would prepare to care for and harvest their ecosystems.

As Dave notes, the changing weather he grew up seeing impacted so many things in his world. As time has passed on, plant and animal reactions are no longer as predictable with the seasonal patterns being scattered. Now, even the jet stream over Manitoba has changed, with every year bringing a new twist in where it ends up traveling and what weather follows.

In our work, animals have showed strange behavior in the times of stress this randomness has created. Dave has seen a coyote and fox - two animals that are very competitive with each other - hunting a mouse together. The only time they fought was when the coyote caught the mouse and wouldn't share with the fox. At other times, bird migrations arrive at unexpected moments, with groups coming and going far off their typical course. With our warm winters, insects have shifted their multi-year boom and bust cycles - with their food chain no longer being intact, this can have disastrous affects on plant life. While these living things are adaptable and plants will remain alive in the soil for many years waiting for a growth trigger, its unknown how long they can sustain themselves in a way that fulfills their key roles in the environment.

With this unpredictability causing problems with foraging responsibly and a broad loss of healthy habitat, Dave remarks that places where land users of all kinds can grow and these communities can flourish are rapidly dwindling. In Ojibwe culture, the saying goes: "You should not want more than what the land can provide."

At the moment, the land cannot provide enough to sustain people without serious help. Dave states:

"Colonialism has brought these problems to our door. Our lake is now a dead lake - we cannot use it. Our forests no longer grow the plants we need to sustain us. And colonialism has brought climate change to our front door. When we lose our plants and animals we lose who we are and who we are supposed to be. These fields don't provide our community food, not like how the land did before. Land value blinds us to what we are doing to these things."

Swept from the Land

Ojibwe people have, throughout history, made a strong effort to learn about and relate to the newcomers to their areas. Part of this was understanding the land-use practices that the settler brought with them. Being a people where managing landscapes was a central part of their culture, finding a way to coexist with other cultures with different practices was important. In these early conversations between peoples, farming methods, crop types, farm animals, and diseases were important to them to understand.

The land-use values many of these newly arriving communities brought with them, and especially as was directed by the colonial governments, was starkly different from what Indigenous peoples had dealt with at the time. While the Ojibwe maintained strong efforts to find a way forward with these new practices, and despite their many allied settler communities relying on and adapting to these small cross-cultural treaty relationships, the Ojibwe were eventually pushed into a corner. Actions were taken by the colonial government to give key traditionally-managed land to settlers, many of whom were unaware that they began clearing and tilling areas that were previously "The Indian's Gardens". Step by step, these food-supplying areas were colonized, the bison were annihilated, fur-bearing animals reduced to miniscule populations, and the resisting Ojibwe tribal groups became sick.

At this time, Yellowquill's group of traditional people were camped north of what is now called Rathwell, MB, along the Assiniboine River. During the making of Treaty 1, they were promised 25 miles square of land near this area with a 5 mile buffer all the way around to protect from disease. It was good land along the river and valley, heavily gardened and managed in the traditional Ojibwe way. However, the area was parsed out for settlers despite the previous agreements, and the original inhabitants were starved out.

Around the 1880s, during a secret foraging expedition in the area of Morden, Giichinika stated: "They have taken our lands that we have tried to save for our children, and the children yet unborn. We will not be able to survive - we are weak, we are sick, and we have no land. The promises that were made were not honest. There is no honor in the words of the light-skinned people. Our journey with them has come to an end."

Several decades later, after the Ojibwe people had been imprisoned to the current location of Swan Lake First Nation, the government realized the agricultural quality of the land they gave to them along Swan Lake. As is part of oral history, the Chief of the time, Miishahkiibinaance, caught word through his network of spies and messengers of a move to sell the land from under them. He responded to the government that he would be willing to sign the papers for this sale. Meeting in the area of Long Plain First Nation, Miishahkiibinaance sat down with these government officials, slowly unpacked his pipe, and rested thoughtfully.

The government officials were eager to have this deal done, insisting the papers be signed immediately. After quite some time of bantering, the sun began to go down. Then, finally, Miishahkiibinaance stood up and replied "When my wife wants to trade a basket, she spends hours bartering. What makes you think we will sell our land without giving full consideration?" With that, he left for home, having wasted the officials' time.

The Trees Still Stand

The area of the Swan Lake First Nation's home Reserve still stands as an example of what the old people of the community stood for. Despite the rapid deforestation in this area throughout the last century, the only removal of trees that happened here was in 1950-1976, with a moratorium on clearing forests being put forward by the Chief and Council at the time.

SLFN is an island of trees and well-sheltered forests when compared to the surrounding landscape, providing protections against storms, winds, and erosion. Even then, Dave laments the creeks and meadows he once played in as kid, most of which are tilled and flattened fields. "These places I used to play in were full of muskrats and beavers and ducks," Dave recalls. "I used to go and camp for days with nothing other than a blanket and a knife. We would find our food in the bush. Our parents never worried about us."

I often ask Dave about what he used to see as a kid, especially about birds and water. In our work with schools, he frequently repeats that what we call "lots" of birds is nowhere near what he once saw. As he tells me, the sky was once white with snow geese during their migrations, and the forests were loud with birds of all kinds. He even recalls playing hide-and-seek with Bitterns, a species that many of us bird enthusiasts today know as rare and very private.

These stories are enchanting to the many classes and groups we teach, but sadly, these interactions are becoming ever more rare. The reality of it is, we've lost, in many cases, half the amount of birds that Dave and many others grew up seeing (see here for an article on bird populations).

Today, the creek Dave and his siblings remember playing in is a cleared and dried field. Many of these creeks don't have water at any time in the year today.

Changing Landscape, Changing Weather

A couple years ago, a weak tornado swept through the Reserve. I was gone that day, but Dave was woken up from a nap by his cat screaming through the screened door. Opening the window to a tornado to the west of our house, he quickly grabbed the cat and took off in his truck. As he tore down the gravel road towards his sister Elaine's house, which had a deep basement, he watched as the tornado traveled south. In front of him, the tornado lifted as it moved towards a wall of oak trees, bounced over his beaver dam valley, and swept over a poplar bluff. Later, we found out the tornado took out the powwow arbor, which stands in an open field, and sent a grain bin flying into the bush nearby. It looked as if the trees redirected the extreme winds of the weak tornado.

This spring, I witnessed my first dust storm. With fields yet unplanted and extreme winds blowing freely, I watched as the soil lifted from the fields by our house, creating soil-dunes in our yard, dramatically reducing visibility, and clouding the whole sky. The winds funneled through a tunnel along our forest's edge so strongly that I was almost knocked off my feet at times. I remember Dave solemnly stating: "The old people talked about this. We are going to see more of this dust again."

Much of southern Manitoba still has traces of these dust storms, with ditches smoothed over by topsoil and communities spending large amounts of money in cleanup efforts. In the environment, we see the strain that was put upon various ecosystems, especially those with minimal amounts of trees and along waterways. I remember seeing photos on the news of how the dust clouds could be seen from space.

As Dave teaches me, the old people who lived through similar events in the 1930's talked about how thankful they were for the trees of their community. This decade was called the "Dirty Thirties" for both economic and environmental reasons, characterized by fires, intense winds, insect swarms, drought, and, of course, dust storms, that affected much of North America. With the strong shelter of oak trees and poplar bluffs, thriving creeks, healthy lake ecosystem, a general disconnection from the economic crash at the time, and a lack of reliance on larger-scale agriculture for sustenance, the Ojibwe fared better than many surrounding farmers. In fact, "drifters" would jump off passing trains to work for the community in exchange for food and shelter, with many staying for several years at a time.

The old people understood that their healthy environment sheltered them from the worst of these storms, but this also reinforced what they already knew about what would happen if it was destroyed. Dave's teachers who lived through this decade had also watched the rapid deforestation of the areas around their home in previous decades. Through old oral histories, a deep knowledge of the environment, and seeing the storms first hand, every one of these old people that taught Dave said that it will happen again - because of what would they (the settler peoples) would do to the land.

The Return of Bad Weather

As we and many others have observed, the weather is undoubtedly different than it once was. Dave frequently remarks how the patterns he was taught to understand are changing, and how shocking the speed of change has become. In Western terms, the polar vortex, weather fronts, head winds, storm cloud formation, and jet stream are becoming extreme, unpredictable, and something entirely new. Dangerous storms are pocketed, rather than moving in fronts, and tornados form rapidly. "For an Ojibwe man like me who grew up living on the land, it's scary," Dave says.

Indeed, our landscape is not ready for what's coming, or what's already arrived. Dave remarks:

"One of the worst things that happened to us is the mile road grid system. Our wetland we once got food and clean water from in the Reserve is cut at 9 different places by these gravel roads. I remember the old people telling me about what they said when these roads were being built. They said, "they must have really lazy horses." They thought it was funny, but they knew the impact it would have on all of us."

"We've turned the landscape into a flushing system. We don't have the wetlands, the beaver dams, the forests on hills that used to slow water and clean it. Instead, we have ditches and tile drainage that dry every drop so big tractors can start tilling as early as possible. That's the water we all drink that's not being recharged or cleaned. That's our soil that's just eroding away. The landscape is like a tarp. All the water is just running off into rivers - once it's gone its gone. Now look at what's happening. We have floods in cities, dust storms in rural areas, and fires up north. Water should be respected. Instead, land value and money blind us."

Even with the rains we had this year, I see how dry the plants and waterways are. All it took was one 10-day heat wave and some strong winds and all the progress that was made started to reverse. I live with these stories Dave tells me in my mind, about the creeks of his childhood, the teaching about trees on hilltops creating wetlands below, about what the landscape used to look like. To me, I see desertification of a landscape once covered in plants, trees, and water. With the stories people older than me tell about what once was here, these changes are scary to see as a young person.

As I've learned, in Ojibwe culture, nothing in the environment is valued higher than the other. It is the same way with the sky, soil, and plants - that what is happening in the sky is a reflection of what's happening on the land. If we remove trees and wetlands, we remove rain and clouds. It is the same if we recreate these ecosystems and maintain them.

This year, we found two plants that have disappeared from the reserve for decades - Meadow Blazing Star and Wild Turnip. For so long in Dave's time monitoring ecosystems and in all my 7 years of learning from him, these plants were gone. For whatever reason, be it the dry/rain/heat cycle of this year or something else, they bloomed. Seeing those plants was the most encouraging thing I've seen in the environment in a long time: the seeds were in the soil for all that time, just waiting for the right conditions to try to grow. As Dave tells me, plants, roots, and seed can stay in the soil for decades lying in wait.

As we see these troubling things happening, we remember that the environment can recover, and quickly, if we help it. Although Western scientists are now calling it "climate collapse", we need to try and understand the human hand in all of this for better or for worse. With all that in mind, I'm reminded of an old Ojibwe saying I recently learned:

These plants are letting us know where they are - and are asking for our help.

 We must learn to use them and to keep them alive.