A new course coming to St. Albert this month aims to help keep one of Canada’s rarest tongues alive.
St. Albert Further Education is offering a Michif language course starting Jan. 30.
Michif is the traditional language of the Métis, but virtually none of the 600,000 Métis in Canada speak it. Statistics Canada reports that just 1,210 Canadians can carry on a conversation in Michif, while a mere 85 use it as their main language at home.
Sharon Morin of Michif Cultural Connections says she has to go back to her grandfather’s time to find someone fluent in Michif, and he didn’t even call it that – he used the term “rough French.”
“Michif is one of the most endangered Indigenous languages in Canada,” she said, and it’s also one that’s entirely Canadian-made.
The UNESCO Atlas of the World's Languages in Danger lists Michif as "critically endangered," which is one step above "extinct."
Cheryl Dumont, executive director of St. Albert Further Education, said her organization decided to start a Michif language course to help implement the Truth and Reconciliation Commission’s calls to action on residential schools, many of which involve language.
“There’s a growing number of people who want to preserve language,” she said, and many who want to learn more about Indigenous language and culture.
Teaching the course is Sherwood Park’s Graham Andrews, one of the few fluent Michif speakers in this region.
Michif is a unique blend of French, Cree, Dakota and other First Nations dialects that came out of the Métis role in the fur trade, Andrews said. It’s been described as having French nouns, Cree verbs and Ojibwe pronouns, along with the trickiest grammatical elements of each language.
“Language is culture,” he said, and Michif reflects the cultural traditions of the Métis.
“This is who we are.”
Michif is a relatively young language, being just a few centuries old, and varies strongly depending on where in Canada you learned to speak it, Morin said. Some areas have more Cree in their dialect, and others more French.
Andrews said he teaches the “heritage Michif” dialect, which is the variety associated with the old Métis settlements along the Red River in Manitoba.
Michif is in its current state today in most part due to residential schools, which forbade Indigenous students from speaking their native languages in an attempt to wipe out their culture, Andrews said. (His grandmother told him about how she was made to kneel on a metal radiator for speaking Michif in one such school.) Many fluent speakers feared to speak Michif in public as a result, and saw it as “dirty” well into the 1970s. Cree, French and other languages supplanted it as a result.
“The clothes, our culture, our language – it disappeared,” Andrews said.
“It’s on life support, but I see it coming back.”
Andrews said he’s seeing a renewed interest in Canada in Michif, and has taken to promoting Michif words on Twitter.
Morin said she was excited to enrol in this course.
“It’s our language, and we had our language taken away, so we’re excited to bring our language back and start showing it to our children.”
The class runs this February and March at the St. Albert Public Library. It costs $130, a portion of which will go towards Michif Cultural Connections. Visit bit.ly/2RXK1p6 for details.
