La lang di Michif TA-PASHIPIIKAN
"La viande," the woman says, her hazel eyes dancing under a fringe of silver bangs. "That means meat."
"Deux poisson," she says next, a nod to the goldfish circling a nearby tank. The little girl likes to come watch them. "Two fish."
The sounds are familiar to anyone who took elementary-school French. But Zoldy is not French, and her words aren't either: they are something rare, something studied in universities in countries that Grace, when she was learning these words as a toddler in Camperville, didn't know existed.
This is Michif, the language of the Métis. In its oral DNA, it carries the history of
To a listener trained in one language or the other, the seams at which Michif's two ancestral tongues join together are a jolt to the ear, a breezy leap from the familiar to the foreign.
"Do you have children?" an English person would say.
"Avez-vous des enfants?" a French speaker would ask.
In Michif, those "enfants" still ring out, but the rest is a twist. "Le zanfan chen kitayawawak?"
The last word, of course, is Cree. Or was Cree. Now, it's all Michif.
Linguists call it "an impossible language," a tongue that challenges everything we think we know about how language happens. All languages carry the culture and histories of their people; with Michif, this cultural cargo is literally built in. Sprung from 200-year-old camps where the children of French fur trappers and Cree mothers forged their own speech, it is, like the Métis themselves, not-quite-one and not-quite-the-other.
"That sort of explains the birth of Michif. A kid grows up hearing French from one parent and Cree from the other," says David Pentland, a linguist at the
For a time, it's a mystery that flourished in small but close-knit communities in the backwoods of the Canadian heartland and into the
The word "Michif," a variation of the word "Métis," stood for both the language and those free people who spoke it. Now, the language survives only in pockets, spoken mostly by elders in outposts of
With perhaps a dozen fluent speakers, Camperville is one of its last Manitoban hospices, a secret shared between linguists and students eager to document Michif in its shrinking native habitat.
Zoldy, 76, learned her Michif when it still thrived. Back in the early 1930s, "everybody" in Camperville spoke Michif, she says. Grandfathers, born around the time Louis Riel was executed, told wide-eyed children the tales of Riel's resistance in Michif. The language was alive then, and its people's stories lived through its words.
Today. four-year-old Billie-Dawn, the little girl dutifully repeating Zoldy's words, doesn't speak Michif. Her mother doesn't speak it, either. Billie-Dawn's grandmother Elaine speaks the language, but like many elders in Camperville, she doesn't speak it often.
Maybe that will change. When Billie-Dawn leaves, Zoldy watches her skip away across the tree-lined street. "I have an idea," Zoldy says. "I'm going to talk to Elaine, and tell her... now, when (Billie-Dawn) visits, we'll talk to her in Michif. So she'll learn."
If Billie-Dawn does learn, she'll be one of the few children who can speak Michif, anywhere. There may be only 500 fluent speakers of Michif left in the world; most are Zoldy's age, or older. The language's life expectancy can now be dated in decades. The clock is ticking.
But the end, for Michif, isn't certain yet.
In the early 1990s, Dutch linguist Peter Bakker travelled all the way from
Bakker is Michif's pre-eminent documentarian. He travelled
The linguist, Pentland says, very possibly knows all the fluent Michif speakers left in
The first pages of Bakker's book are titled "The Problem of Michif." A problem for linguists, that is, though not for its speakers: there's no language in the world quite like this one.
Languages collide in different ways. Usually, the pidgins come first, stripped-down languages used for trade and communications between groups that don't share a language. Pidgins can be passed to children as a mother tongue, at which point they become the often-colourful creoles, dozens of which are dotted along the path of European colonization.
Take
Then there is "code-switching," such as the effortless Spanglish of bilingual Latino teens in the
But none of these examples are what linguists call mixed languages; none of these are Michif. Unlike a pidgin, Michif's earliest form wasn't simplified French and Cree; it was the orderly blend of both. Unlike those Spanglish-speaking teens, modern Michif speakers usually don't speak either French or Cree, and can only understand glimpses of those languages; their vocabulary is too divided, married from two sources into an indivisible whole.
This is a rare occurrence. Of the more than 2,000 tongues on the planet, only seven may be true mixed languages. One, Mednyj Aleut, is spoken on
Not that Michif is the only Canadian language lumbering towards the same fate. In 1996, a survey of
For now, Michif is still being spoken, passed from person to person like a flickering torch. To most Métis under the age of 50, Michif is known best in whispers and memories; words for food, Pentland explains, things you say to grandparents. These are the Michif words most people know now.
At the International Métisfest in late August,
Fleury himself knows a lot about the language. In Michif circles, he is a famous speaker and language advocate, having served as the Michif director for the Manitoba Métis Federation. He has translated books, made videos and audio recordings for websites such as LearnMichif.com and spoken about his heritage language at conferences in
In 2000, Fleury published a Michif prayer as part of a document for the Métis National Council's language revival strategy. "Sa prend lee famee di Michif chee shoohkshichik kispin la Nation di Michif chee shoohkawk," he wrote. "We must have strong Métis families to have a strong Métis Nation."
To save that language for future generations of strong Métis families, Fleury and others are now in a fight against the tide of the present and the crush of the past.
Quietly lined up along Hwy. 20, butting against the southern edge of Pine Creek First Nation, Camperville tumbled roughly through the 20th century.
There's not much work here. In years past the people -- mostly Métis and Ojibwe -- eked a living from the land, trapping and fishing. Decades ago,
Along the dusty main road there is a huddle of houses and two gas stations. The nearest grocery store is 45 minutes south, in Winnipegosis; Camperville's grocery burned down about a decade ago, and wasn't rebuilt. Then the former convent, which had been turned into a restaurant, burned down. This year, a local hunting guide's place burned down.
Guiding is one of the few jobs for men in in a town where most of the population is unemployed. To pay for the gas they need to shop in
Despite these hardships, the village is growing. Young parents who once left for
Camperville doesn't wear its troubles on its sleeve. The ills of poverty are creeping closer -- Oxy-Contin addiction, already ravaging Winnipeg, has started to infiltrate -- but the town's rectangular slatboard houses are gaily painted, their gardens carefully tended and bursting with the leaves of traditional teas and other good things to eat.
Camperville's council hall sits along the main road. Outside the boxy building flies a bright blue flag, emblazoned with the white infinity symbol of the Métis. Today it flies at half-mast, the morning after Camperville lost a resident to a stroke. This is the kind of place where everybody is mourned, and everybody is missed.
Inside the council building, Gail Welburn barrels in to the council's office room, clutching the miniature Métis L'assumption sash that serves as her keychain. She is Grace Zoldy's daughter, and at 47, she's probably the youngest fluent Michif speaker left in Camperville. "Don't quote me on that," she says cautiously, but her mother can't think of anyone younger either.
Like a lot of residents, Welburn is back from away. She worked as a broadcaster for NCI Radio in
In Camperville, she fits right in. Feisty women seem to run this town. Their laughter bounces off the walls of the council office, their hearty greetings ring across narrow streets. Despite relative isolation and tight finances, they have plans for Camperville, big plans.
A year ago, they opened an exercise room that proved so popular with elder women, they can barely order enough equipment to meet the demand. Earlier this year, one of Welburn's pet projects -- a music program for kids -- spurred the creation of a young band, who are eagerly learning Johnny Cash and Metallica songs to play at town dances.
There's another project that has to get off the ground. In March, hoping to revive the tongue that was once spoken by everyone in Camperville who wasn't a priest or a nun, Welburn launched a six-week Michif-language program. It was sort of a test, and she gamely extracted promised students from the town's Métis parents.
When the class started, almost nobody came. "I think my timing totally sucked," she says bluntly. "In March, April, May, everybody's so glad it's melting off. They don't want to be sitting inside learning this stuff."
Welburn is not daunted. She's going to try again in the fall, hoping that this time, Michif will find its way onto young tongues. One man came to the March classes so he could "know what (his grandparents) are talking about when they talk about me," he said. There's interest out there, Welburn guesses, and it's now or never for Michif.
"We know it's dying," she says.
People don't mince words in Camperville.
--
Back in
Bakker's enthusiasm for Michif, Chartrand muses, is instructive. "If we can see such an interest (in Michif) in
Chartrand, 50, doesn't speak Michif, though he understands a little bit. Raised in
Now, the MMF is trying to help Michif claw out of the belly of Ojibwe and English and French and all the other languages that gobbled it up. It's an identity thing: the Métis speak many languages, but only Michif is truly theirs. It's a history thing, too.
"Our country is so bad at our understanding of our own history," Chartrand says. "We study everyone else's history but our own. This language can't be replicated anywhere. It's one of
In coming years, Michif may get the recognition that's eluded it for so long. In April, the province passed an act naming Michif, among other tongues, as one of
Meanwhile, the MMF currently receives no funding for Michif language programs. It's hard to save a language on a shoestring. But the MMF will find a way, Chartrand says. The Métis government's publishing arm, Pemmican Publications, currently sells four Michif books and compiled a Michif dictionary. The Louis Riel Institute, the MMF's education wing, recently put in a $900,000 funding request to develop and digitize a collection of Michif-learning resources.
Right now, with Norman Fleury's help, the LRI is putting the final touches on a series of children's picture books. Chartrand slips a draft of one of the books across his desk. La Pchit Fii, it's called, orThe Little Girl. Inside is stuff for young minds to grab hold of: a picture of a pony-tailed toddler pushing a toy vacuum is subtitled "La pchit fii atooshkew avik soon vacuum." The little girl is working with her vacuum.
The booklet is part of a strategy huddled around the basic premise that Michif needs to get to children. Chartrand and the MMF imagine accredited Michif language teachers. They picture DVDs and Michif language software. They even picture Michif in schools. "We are adamantly going to be pushing this to go into curriculums," Chartrand says. "This is our language, and it helped found the West. We need to do everything we can. These languages are born and bred here. If they die, they die forever."
It's going to be a "hard sell," Chartrand admits, to push a tiny and aging language into formal education. But Michif, and the Métis people themselves, are tenacious, he insists. After years spurned as "half-breeds," after a generation where they were recognized by no government and given no formal identity, the Métis people are still here.
And in time, Chartrand vows, the Michif language will be here too. If the plan to get Michif into schools doesn't work, they'll bring it to Métis-dominant daycares. Or into homes, if need be. "We're not giving up. Even without government funding, we'll try our best," the president says, pauses, and rephrases. "If the government comes or not, we will succeed."
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Outside the salt lake on the Camperville's southern edge, men from Sapotaweyak First Nation are picking sweetgrass. With the permission of area residents, they come down here a few times a week, pulling bundles of the sacred medicine and beating the stalks against the ground "to get the yellow," or trash grasses, out.
It's tiring work. Sitting in a big white truck, a 27-year-old woman watches the men thrash and pull. Normally, she'd be twisting the bundles into braids, to sell at pow-wows and to distributors for $1.75 a bunch. But she sprained her wrist after weaving more than 400 knots last week, so today she just watches.
The woman is Métis. Her partner is First Nations; he speaks Saulteaux. Does she know anyone who speaks Michif? "No!" she exclaims, raising her eyebrows in surprise. "Actually, I have a great-grandfather. Maybe he does."
A surprising language; a hidden language. Even in Camperville, many of the dozen or so elders who speak it fluently won't speak it to the Free Press; some need to be coaxed even to speak it to each other. Grace Zoldy talks to some of her friends in Michif, and they respond in English.
Why won't some elders speak it to a broad public? "They're shy," Welburn shrugs, and teasingly waves at an elder man down the street who insisted he was "too busy" to speak Michif to a pair of reporters. "He's not busy. He's just scared," she laughs. "Hey, ya chicken!"
This language was once shouted in children's games.
For clues to how it fell to a whisper, look to the northern edge of Camperville. There stands a stately stone church, bordered on one side by a meticulously manicured graveyard and on the other by the foundations of what used to be a residential school.
The school was torn down, years ago. But although the Métis and First Nations elders have hard memories of the place, many are still devoted Roman Catholics: the church's immaculately preserved bell tower still watches over the sparkling waters of Lake Winnipegosis. Earlier this year, Camperville threw the church a gala 100th birthday party. People came home from all over
Still, it was in and around those halls that the first and most deadly blows against Michif were struck. Grace Zoldy didn't speak English until she and the other Métis children in Camperville during the 1930s were pressed into a religious day school. The First Nations kids were boarded at the residential school; the Métis, Zoldy says, "were just poor." Their parents had to learn what money was before they could scrape together the nickel needed to buy them a pencil for school; they'd break the pencils in half to share.
Inside the school walls, the nuns made their opinions about the Métis well-known. Teachers banned students from talking about Louis Riel; to do so, they had to explain to the baffled children what "treason" meant. And then there was the matter of words. As kids, "we were all playing together and all talking in Michif, all of us," Zoldy remembers. "At school, it wasn't allowed for us to speak Michif. It 'wasn't a language' (to the nuns)."
Chartrand remembers being strapped across the wrist for daring to speak Saulteaux in school. Welburn, when asked how this strict history made the elders shy to speak, purses her lips for a minute and points to her wrist. "You see this bracelet?" she asks.
The bracelet Welburn wears is made from tiny, striped berries that dry into beads. The Métis and the First Nations used to love them, Welburn says, until the residential school put kids to work picking them from the prickly bush. For hours, the children would pick and pick and pick, their hands welling up with scratches and criss-crossed welts.
After the kids left school, nobody picked the berries anymore.
The language, too, left welts and scars. Scolded and strapped just for speaking Michif, young Métis held their tongues. In those days, Michif was a trap, not a treasure: Métis men and women who wanted to make it in
Zoldy used to be shy to speak Michif, too. That changed when Peter Bakker landed in her living room, flown from
He told her something else, too. "Peter said, 'Grace, I'm going to tell you something. Don't ever let your Michif language die. Do whatever you can to keep it alive.' I'm not getting younger. We're losing our language. I don't want to let that happen."
She pauses, stares at the maple spreading outside her window, and murmurs something in the full-bodied consonants of her native speech.
What does it mean? "It means, 'I want to leave the Michif language here for my people,'" she says.
--
Stones thrown in a pond. The ripples are spreading.
Back in Camperville, the foot-trodden paths and neat dirt roads spread out like veins. Down these arteries drive a handful of men and women who could be among the last people in the world to speak Michif. And they are leaving things behind for their people.
They're the only ones, after all, who can get the job done. Rita Flamand, a Camperville elder whose passionate battle to save Michif led her to compose the language's first customized writing system, came to her Michif mission after attending an aboriginal interpreter course at
"This is how come I went, and I was the only Michif person there," she laughs. "Even students didn't know what the heck Michif was. I realized nobody is doing anything about the Michif language. But we speak it, we spoke all our lives. I realized the government doesn't help us."
Here and across
A website, LearnMichif.com, founded by a group of Métis youth in B.C. and featuring online Michif lessons, draws from Bakker's work and videos by the MMF. Another website, michifdictionary.com, pledges to gather Michif linguistic experts together to produce a complete grammar and dictionary.
Zoldy translated parts of the Bible into Li Liivre Oche Michif Ayamiiawina, "the Book of Michif Prayers," and consults with the
At a ceremony in June, Zoldy was lauded with the Keeping the Fires Burning award, an honour given to those who are saving and sharing aboriginal culture. She keeps the plaque standing proudly beneath photos of children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren. Its frame reflects the crossed Métis flags hanging neatly on the wall; it hints at the hope of a different future, one where Michif could still echo down these roads, across these forests.
"This is not for me," Zoldy says, holding the Keeping the Fires Burning plaque in soft, spiderweb-lined hands. "This is for my people. I want something to come out of this. I've worked so hard."
melissa.martin@freepress.mb.ca