The Cost of Forgetting: Traditional Ojibwe Teachings for Today's World

The Cost of Forgetting: Traditional Ojibwe Teachings For Today's World

Written by Finn Rachul

Sourced from conversation with David Scott

October 18, 2025

There are few people left who understand the ins and outs of what life was once like for the traditional Ojibwe tribes. Dave and I frequently talk about these oral histories as they really paint a picture of the value system of the traditional people alive today. These stories continue to be very relevant today, even in a time where our lives are so disconnected from nature. As I have learned, these teachings are timeless - even though our lives are nowhere close to what it was once like for the Ojibwe people that once occupied this area, we are still human beings just as reliant on the environment as they were.

Survival and Thriving on the Land

In order to understand the value system of the traditional Ojibwe, we have to talk about the importance of surviving and living with the environment. As Dave tells me, life wasn't about gaining objects or money as in the Western value system, but rather living a full life together with your community. Life was about taking what you needed and sharing the rest so that everyone thrived. While they may have seemed "primitive" and "tribal" to the Western eyes of the British who first encountered them, the Ojibwe never saw themselves as poor - they had plenty of food, shelter, medicines, a healthy environment, a strong culture, and anything else a human being needs to thrive. It wasn't until people began to measure themselves against Western society that they began to think of themselves as lacking or poor. However, even with everything the governments did to impoverish and erase the Ojibwe, the old people Dave was taught by never blamed or thought themselves as impoverished.

In this way, the Ojibwe were an incredibly strong people. As long as they were allowed to care for the land where they could do their hunting, gathering, and growing, they thrived. Dave talks about how it wasn't until this was broken, starting during the fur trade era and continued by the actions of Residential schools, that the Ojibwe began to see themselves as weak. The times of hardship in Dave's oral histories began when they had to fight for their rights and way of living and adapt to the the newly inflicted legal systems and western definitions of "right" and "wrong". Believing in the law "Obehmaatizee", they had to stand up for themselves and insist they they be treated as human beings too. Even today, the stubbornness of the Ojibwe of Swan Lake led to them being dubbed "That troublesome band of Indians".

While this happened, the landscape was widely deforested and drained, and the plants, animal, weather and water the Ojibwe relied on was destroyed. Dave remembers Joe Walker and John Swain, two of his teachers, telling him that the settlers would one day realize what they done to the Anishinaabe, and that they'd pay for it in the end. Today's leaders think that to "pay" is in monetary terms. As Dave tells the story, back when they fought for treaty justice, it meant restoring the real spirit and intent of treaty. As we have written about before, that means finding away for us to coexist, being allowed to practice our own beliefs, learning from one another, living with the land, and creating a world for the next generations to thrive. That is the meaning of Ogobizawin, the old Ojibwe word for treaty, and their understanding of the signing of Treaty 1.

In this time, the Ojibwe gave the Western people the benefit of the doubt, hoping that someday they would recognize what they were doing to themselves with their way of life wasn't going to improve their lives. We have illustrated some of the effects we see in our day to day work before, how this way of life is beginning to affect all of us. The Ojibwe watched the mile grid road system, the drainage and deforestation, the altering of the landscape, and knew that everyone, no matter what culture or way of life, we would pay the price.

In years gone by, "pay" was the Dust Bowl events of the 1930s. Back then, with that time's current land practices, people found a way to restore the landscape enough to survive by planting trees and holding down soil. Nowadays, we have found new and more efficient ways to exploit the land, using artificial methods to prolong how much we can take from it before our agriculture collapses like the Dust Bowl years. We continue to use ground water at staggering rates with all methods of recharging it (wetlands, waterways, lakes, and ponds) being removed from the landscape. No matter how disconnected from nature we are, we will eventually remember we rely on it sooner or later. We will "pay" in multiple ways, not only the declining environment, but also the disconnection of people, the loss of community, and the mental health crisis - the Ojibwe recognized all these things were connected.

Fighting for Their Rights

In the 1980s, the Indian Rights movement was in full swing. Dave played a strong part in this fight, as things began to change in the '70s and '80s when the control of the Indian Act began to wain as some communities took back their power. Ever since Chief Yellowquill threw the British treaty medal on the ground, saying that there was no honor in those objects, his people have resisted the restrictions meant to contain and erase the Ojibwe people.

Although slow going, these movements have garnered a reaction. In many ways, progress faces a lot of resistance, such as Stephan Harper's Tribunal Act making settlements financial instead of land-based. Dave tells me "In Yellowquill's treating with the British, he wanted a large protected area to sustain their way of life and protect from the many new diseases of the time. This "large reserve" still does not exist."

As Dave observes, with these fights continuing, governments may eventually have to expropriate land to meet their legal obligations to create an Indigenous land base - something that will raise tensions and be bad for the relationship between Canada's many peoples:

"That’s why some argue the land-back movement might create distance instead of shared responsibility. The newer movement is more demanding- often justifiably so - but not always mindful of the consequences. When land-back involves unceded areas, settlers living there are drawn into conflict."

"It could be a correction to how land was supposed to be shared, but it’s better to gain cooperation than force governments through courts. Correcting the laws of this country is key, especially on issues like water."

Water rights, agricultural drainage, and private land laws have created major problems. These issues, ones that were supposed to be part of a treaty relationship, have been delegated to provincial jurisdiction. Acts such as the Natural Resources Transfer Act were designed to weaken Indian rights as originally natural resources were supposed to be shared, as Dave tells me.

The "depth of a plowshare" phrase from Treaty 6 illustrates this, Dave says, where chiefs agreed to share the land for farming, but not surrender their world. When asked about the animals, the Indians were told "Those are yours, we will bring our own animals", going through all the various parts of the environment they cared about. No part of Ojibwe history talks about an agreement for destroying the environment. Yet now, industrial-scale agriculture has done just that to the landscape the Ojibwe once took care of, all in the name of short-term profits but causing long-term ruin.

Dave goes on:

"For us, living well has always meant thinking of generations to come. If the environment collapses, we all suffer. That’s the lesson of Obehmaatizee: balance with life. During the fur trade, some of our people forgot that teaching and became greedy like settlers. But Obehmaatizee isn’t just about humans - it includes everything we need to live: water, food, shelter, and harmony among living things. Forgetting those teachings separates us from who we are."

"Even in land-back debates, we need to ask whether regaining land will benefit our people or just create new landowners following the same profit model.

For me, the land should return to Indigenous stewardship - but outside the Indian Act, free of government control. Communities should decide how to manage it, whether traditionally or otherwise."

Unfortunately, much of today's generations have absorbed the Western ideas about money, with anything and everything having monetary value assigned to them when there should be no such thing. Forests, water, and soil are far too important to be boxed into an economic niche. We value abstract ideas like money in corporations over the health and happiness of human beings. Today, we all face challenges to survival in a changing climate, not wealth.

In these conversations, I am reminded of Dave's story about the time of homestead farmers, families who managed their own small plot of land not for massive profit, but for survival and thriving. This is mirrored by how, for example, the Cree of the north once managed every lake and swamp, with every part of the landscape being looked after and related to by people. The lack people on the land caring for it has had serious consequences. In the boreal forests where the Cree once would have used control burns to maintain forest health, there are now droughts combined with a massive build up in brush material on the forest floor - a tinder box for devastating wild fires that have already been seen this year.

Now, we are isolated, towns are disconnected from nature, with the average person hardly knowing what is happening on the landscape a mile or two away from them, or even who their neighbor is next door. Religion too has a role to play in this separation, in Dave's experience. He sees this play out in a "if you're not in my church, I don't care about you" mentality. For him, it is this attitude that has led settler populations to ignore their Indigenous neighbors altogether, along with all the propaganda and racism that has been pushed forward throughout colonial history.

This obsession with profit and property value has impacted every part of the population, and we "pay" in many ways. For example, young people cannot afford to a place to live or farm, being blocked from the things their parents or grandparents once had access to. Meanwhile, Indigenous peoples are blocked or removed from the best land, and left on small agricultural plots with no place to expand.

Dave frequently discusses this dysfunction in how we view the land:

"Rights are legal matters; responsibilities are moral. We have lost the very ability to continue our responsibility to the land and future generations. Western society values money over that moral duty. Even when we settle land claims, municipalities are compensated immediately, while our benefits take generations.

That’s injustice - valuing wealth over fairness. Laws can and must change to create justice for Indigenous people. Private land ownership law itself is a colonial invention that blocks that justice."

Ideas Erased

When talking about these topics about how we find a way of life that is responsible to both the environment and people, many think that change is impossible. Any discussion we have on this these days is capped by a mentality that we are "Too far down this road. It is too late to change." Not only did the Crown work hard to erase Indigenous identity across North America, but also to erase their ideas.

In a document Dave was a part of regarding the relationship of the Church as an entity and how it affected Indigenous peoples in Canada, the statement is "you cannot separate the Church from the culture it came from." This continues into our current laws and history in this country, clearly illustrated by the Fur Trade era and the conflict it created - you can't separate our current laws and history from the British colonial culture they came from.

"The British colonial mindset, and corporations like Hudson’s Bay, treated faith, land, and profit as one. It all began with the Doctrine of Discovery - Papal law saying that if you didn’t see anyone on the land, you could claim it, which is a religious excuse for stealing.

Our elders used to say the Christian God settlers worshipped was really the god of money. They joked that “their god is that paper they love so much.” To them, that god was not loving but greedy. There's even a Saulteaux word that the Ojibwe used about people standing in front of a cross praying, meaning "to argue against a tree with a cross"."

"When Gichinika spoke to the Ojibwe during Treaty 1 in 1871, he said, “We will not be at the mercy of any church. We believe in our own ways - your God has no place among my people.” He meant that the Ojibwe values - their way of life - had no room for that kind of thinking. We already understood what those missionaries offered and said, “No, thank you.” Through the fur trade, we saw what greed did to communities, teaching us to instead learn everything about those around us and about the environment itself so it doesn’t one day come back and hurt us."

A History of Conflicts - A Future of Hope

These conflicts within our shared history still impact us today. On the land and within the oral histories of the Ojibwe, we can see first hand the effects of what happens when we look at our relationship with each other and the environment through only monetary means.

As the Ojibwe teach, to forget values like looking at all people as human beings or our reliance on a healthy environment means the deterioration of those things. In times of environmental and social crisis like these, we have to look elsewhere outside the box of monetizing nature, the invisible borders of private land rights, or people as adversaries.

The Ojibwe understood well what would happen when we disconnected ourselves from our responsibility to the land and maintaining it for future generations. Today, we don't even know our next door neighbors, and neither is there a strong way for us to relate to one another. Within that picture of isolation, what's left of the environment around us is sick and disappearing, the weather is changing, and our food systems are becoming more and more obviously unsustainable. In this situation, unsustainable means a need to change or risk a collapse.

Indeed, we must learn to live with the land differently than we do now for the sake of not only ourselves but those following us. The Ojibwe understood well that no legacy, be it riches or fame or power, lasts as long as doing what you can during your lifetime to create a healthy world for the next generations. Likewise, they knew their role and the necessity of relating with and maintaining even far away lakes and forests. Doing that in many places now requires a largely different lifestyle than how we live today, although it is no less imperative that we do so.

Dave frequently describes the once common homestead farming of his home area in the Tiger Hills as a way of life that was lost - one that was, for the most part, about day-to-day survival rather than profit. This way of life, where people had homes and gardens and farms among the hills and forests and plains of Manitoba, had far less of an impact on the land than the massive plowed square miles of cash crops with the occasional treed-island of a farmhouse lot. This homesteader lifestyle, combined with the type of land stewardship that the Indigenous peoples once did, would be a far better direction to move than continuing on our current path.

Economies will go up and down and politics will move as slowly as it does, but what doesn't change is the fact that we need water, food, and a community around us - necessities that are all sustained by a healthy environment. Our current way of life does impact this, but all that it takes to change is a shared responsibility to protect those things for our children and onward. Despite the history we have been through and the dominant way of living it has created, we must learn to prioritize and protect what matters - clearly illustrated by the teachings and real-world wisdom of the Ojibwe culture that has found a way to live on and sustain the land we live on now for thousands of years.