Initially, the genesis of the Métis nation was through the fur trade and basically the voyageurs from primarily the Montreal and Quebec area. Historically, the mixed ancestry people evolved as the Acadians further evolved inland as the Québécois, and it's only in the far reaches of western Canada where the Métis evolved as a distinct indigenous people.
Through time, we developed the language known as Michif, basically for simplicity. The nouns are French and the rest of it is primarily Cree. It's a new language developed within the Métis nation, the Métis people. The Gabriel Dumont Institute and the Louis Riel Institute have been doing a lot of videotaping and putting out materials to capture that.
Turtle Mountain Indian Reservation in North Dakota was actually the first one to put out the Michif dictionary back in the late 1970s, I believe. A lot of the people on that Indian reservation still speak Michif, still play the music and still dance, but they are not recognized as Métis in the United States. You're either an Indian or you're not, but our nation still extends there.
There are somewhere in the neighbourhood of about 1,000 speakers left, but they are all getting older, like 65 and older. There are initiatives like the one at the high school in Île-à-la-Crosse. For the last 20 years, it has been teaching it in the schools.
It's starting to come back, but we certainly need assistance to enable us to go forward. We need to find ways and means to do that.