Dave's journey to Steckle Farm first started with the question "as indigenous people liv[e] in an urban setting, what is our relationship to the land? [W]hat is our relationship to the land within the city?" He started gardening to feel more connected with the land, and that's when he met Hannah Tait Neufeld and Kim Anderson, researchers of indigenous food sovereignty and security. Through gardening, they were able to find answers to questions such as what it "means to be indigenous living in the city," and came to a realization that "what identifies us as a people is our relationship to the land." Soon, the small garden plot that they started in 2016 grew to four garden plots and a sugar bush owned by White Owl. This rapid growth led them to start looking into larger plots of land, and that's when they found Steckle Farm.
Jean Steckle and her brother were the last of the Steckles to own the farm. Jean had spent her life as a health worker, having worked with the World Health Organization throughout Africa for most of her career. She then came back to Canada and then worked with an indigenous health organization across Canada. She had this connection to not a particular community, but a broad connection across Canada with indigenous people, so when she decided to put what was left of the farm in trust (about 13 acres), she put that into trust to be an educational farm. Part of their mandate was to always have a space for indigenous people to be able to farm there as well. The farm was largely unused for number of years, so when Dave and his team came knocking at the door, they were welcomed in right away. They're "farming in an area that's probably been farmed for thousands of years in some ways connected to the Chu-not-in people, and there's been some evidence of Mississauga use as well. So, there's a long history of agricultural use within there." Dave and his team spent half of their time gardening, and the other half of our time trying to figure out the history of the area because they really felt that that was important to know the story of the land that they're working on. He still has a lot of interest in the history and the stories of this land, because he thinks that as land-based workers, we have to understand beyond soil, to the spiritual and historical and ancestral roots that we're also working in as well.
Wanting to help urban indigenous people reclaim parts of their history and culture, the farm has also hosted a couple workshops to teach indigenous youth what they can do with the food once its grown. Most recently, chef Sydney Kewell was invited onto the farm to host a tortilla making day using the freshly harvested corn.