“You Don’t Even Know What You Lost”: The Story of Peter Schuler

A HERITAGE MISSISSAUGA PROFILE ON PETER SCHULER

WRITTEN BY: MEGHAN MACKINTOSH

A small sweat lodge sits under the trees, its low frame made from small trees and covered with tarps. To someone unfamiliar, it might look simple.

To Peter Schuler, it holds teachings and ceremony that go back many, many generations.

“My English taxpayer name is Peter Schuler,” he says.

The line carries humour, but it also carries weight. Names in Peter’s life come in two forms: the name that the government recognizes you with, the one they recognize, and names that come from the tobacco, the one that the Spirit recognizes.

Today he lives with his wife at the Six Nations of the Grand River and has family on both Six Nations and the Mississaugas of the Credit Reserve.

His story, however, does not begin there.

Growing Up Between Worlds

Peter grew up a few hundred feet off reserve on a small farm near Caledonia and was unaware that there were two separate reserves, as his family visited his grandmother Amelia La Forme (Schuler) on the Credit Reserve and his Aunt Stella and Uncle Howard Beaver on Six Nations.

As a child he knew he was Indigenous, but that was it … no knowledge of two reserves or two identities or, in the case of Six Nations, six possible identities.

While the adults knew this, it wasn’t spoken of and his parents weren’t following traditional ways of being, and the Credit Reserve was long Christianized and traditional ways were not recognized or spoken of.

He did not attend school on reserve and the first school was a one-room school with a big woodstove in the centre, eight grades and one teacher.

Later, when the one-room schools were consolidated and he and his siblings were initially the only Indigenous kids, that difference became visible.

“That is where I really first encountered racism,” he recalls. “You ended up fighting with most of the kids at the school.”

The experience followed him into adolescence. By the time he was fifteen, anger had become a constant presence.

His father recognized it immediately.

“If you don’t learn to control your temper,” he told him, “you’re going to kill somebody.”

Peter does not soften the memory. He also does not separate that anger from its deeper source.

Understanding who he was, and where he came from, would take many years.

Family History and Questions That Arrive Late

Some answers came much later in life. By the time he was in his late teens he figured out there were two reserves, but not much more than that.

“There was a grandfather that I knew as my mother’s father, Edward Plevin. He was an avid hunter and fisherman and he was, if I remember correctly, from Guernsey Island over the pond as they say. When I was around 50 years old I found out that he was not my mother’s biological father.”

This fact raised some interesting questions, as his mother told him that her real father was a man named Charles Quibell and that her mother (my grandmother) told her that he was Indigenous.

“When my mother was about 80 years old she wanted to know more about her real father and I said I would use tobacco to see what I could find, and I did find his military record but could not dig deep because you had to prove that you were a relative to do that. But I was certain it was the right guy I was looking at.”

By chance his mother met a man that had her father’s surname while attending an event in Simcoe and it turned out he was her fourth cousin.

This led to her meeting half-siblings.

“When my mother met her relatives she asked about her father’s Indigenous roots and was told, ‘We aren’t Indigenous. They only said that back then because it was too hard to be French.'”

“This I find hard to believe. Who would say you were Indigenous when the government was taking Indian children away from parents and putting them into Residential Schools, when you couldn’t hire a lawyer or any of the other things that were put onto Indian people?

“So I don’t know if my mother has any Indigenous ancestry for sure, but I did meet another person with that same last name at an education conference. They were from down Kingston way and they had a similar claim to Indian identity in their family tree. Where there’s smoke there’s fire, but until I see flames it will remain a family mystery.”

What People Assume

Throughout his life, Peter has often found himself correcting assumptions about Indigenous identity.

“A lot of people assume that because you are Indigenous, you know your language, you go to ceremony, you have all of that,” he says. “And this is largely a false assumption.”

Colonial policies disrupted families in different ways. Teachings were interrupted. Knowledge lost, hidden or broken apart across generations.

Peter says many people grow up with a sense of identity but without the teachings that were once part of that identity.

“You are expected to know things,” he says. “But no one ever taught you those things.”

Identity does not disappear because teachings were interrupted, but it can leave a person searching for things that should have been there all along.

Language as Memory

For Peter, language sits at the centre of that loss.

“When you lose your language,” he says, “you lose your memory because you lose oral history.”

Language is not simply vocabulary. It carries ways of understanding the world.

“There is so much buried in the language,” he explains. “Manidoonsag translates into insects in the dictionary, but it means little spirits and that changes the way one looks at insects.”

The difference changes how a person relates to the natural world.

Another phrase he returns to is often translated to “all my relations,” but its meaning extends far beyond human relationships.

“Our ancestors’ understanding,” Peter says, “was that we were no more important than that tree. We are related to the tree and all other non-humans.”

In this way the language carries a worldview.

The Weight of Words

Peter also pays close attention to the language used in the Canadian political systems.

“I don’t say the Mississaugas of the Credit First Nation,” he says. “I say the Mississaugas of the Credit Reserve. And I do that on purpose.”

For him the distinction matters.

“When you say First Nation, it sounds like the reserve is the Nation,” he explains. “Which it is not. It is a reserve.”

“The word for reserve in our language translates to leftover. We got the leftovers and there wasn’t much left over.”

From there, Peter widens the conversation to the history of land and displacement.

He describes how colonial systems often separated communities and territories in ways that weakened traditional governance and ways of being.

“When we talk about divide and conquer,” he says, “that’s the colonizer’s chief strategy.”

The words used to describe Indigenous communities carry history. They reflect power, negotiation and survival over time.

Teachings on the Land

Sitting outside near the sweat lodge, Peter gestures to the plants growing around him.

“There’s medicine growing all over the place here,” he says. “We don’t use it as much as we used to but people are learning from the few who still carry the knowledge.”

“There was an old man on this reserve by the name of Codabush and when my dad was a kid the old man was going blind and he would send my dad to find medicine for him and made him keep looking until he came back with the right plant. That old man died in 1924 when my dad was 12, so the knowledge was here then.”

Peter remembers how his parents lived with the rhythms of the seasons. Food was stored, preserved when in season. Berries canned, relish and sauces made, cherries frozen to later make pies, potatoes, carrots and other vegetables from the garden.

“Hardly anyone does that any more. Most people have lost that knowledge.”

Strawberries and Stolen Time

Peter remembers when strawberries were not available year-round. When they arrived in season the timing mattered.

At Longhouse, he explains, there is a ceremony held to honour the strawberry and it was supposed to happen when the wild strawberries were ready to eat.

“When we have strawberries 365 days a year,” he asks, “what did we take away from that plant?”

His answer unfolds slowly.

“You stole from that plant its place as a time marker,” he says.

“We stole that from ourselves too.”

“We stole the anticipation of the first taste of a fresh berry.”

“We stole the medicine that’s in there.”

“We lost the teachings that come with the medicine carried in the plant.”

Ceremony, in this way, becomes a way of remembering the natural order of things.

Where History Begins

Peter is candid about his frustration with how Indigenous history is often presented. At a historical conference, he recalls raising a simple question.

“Why are we sitting here listening to you tell us who we are? Why are we starting our history post-contact?”

He was addressing the fact that it was settler anthropologists, researchers and authors presenting on the history of the Mississaugas of the Credit.

“I think we should start our history with our Creation Story … without that you don’t even know who you are.”

Continuing the Conversation

The questions Peter raises about memory, language, and identity are not confined to conversations around the sweat lodge.

They continue to shape his work today.

In May 2026, he launched The Sound of the Homeland Drum, a collection of selected writings from the last decade published by ArtsEverywhere and Musagetes.

The book reflects a lifetime spent exploring the relationships between people, language, land, and the teachings carried forward through story.

What Remains

Over the years, ceremony became an important part of Peter’s life. It did not erase all the anger he carried when he was younger, but it gave direction and tempered it.

“I had to learn to sit,” he says. “To listen.”

Loss, inheritance, and memory remain close to the surface in his life.

Huntington’s disease has affected his family across generations, shaping how he thinks about what is passed forward and what is carried within us.

“We have this concept called blood memory,” he says. “You are born with memory.”

He points to the natural world for examples: birds migrating across continents, turtles hatching alone without parents and going to the water, monarch butterflies returning to the same place generation after generation.

“We understood that,” he says. “We are no different from them. We too are born with memory.”

For Peter, identity is not something defined only by records or institutions. It lives in language, ceremony, land and in the stories people carry forward.

Again and again he returns to the same reflection.

“We don’t even know what we have lost.”

Then he offers the next step, not as instruction but as invitation.

“You’ll never know what you lost unless you go and try to find out who you really are,” he says.

“It’s all in the language, ceremonies, philosophy and ways of being carried by your ancestors. You are not the one whose history starts post-contact.

You are Anishinaabe, Ongwehowe, Cree, Mi’kmaq or any of those original peoples of this land.”