Tansi, tanshi. Bonjour. Hello. I'm Melanie Griffith Brice.
[Witness spoke in Northern Michif and provided the following text:]
Nisihkâson Melanie Brice. Michif niya. Kayate Lac Prairies ochi niya ekwa L'brroshå Sâkahikan. Oskana kâ-asastîki mîkwac niwîkin.
[Witness provided the following translation:]
My name is Melanie Griffith Brice. I am Michif. I am originally from Meadow Lake and Jackfish Lake. I live in Regina currently.
I'm Dr. Melanie Griffith Brice. I'm the Gabriel Dumont research chair in Michif and Métis education in the faculty of education at the University of Regina.
I'm in the process of reclaiming my language, northern Michif. Like many indigenous people of my generation, due to the impacts of formal education and urbanization, I do not speak my language. However, I was fortunate to grow up hearing the language around me from my grandparents, my mother, my aunt, my uncles and other extended family. I learned some basic commands, but I did not develop any proficiency in the language.
As a child, I recall hearing my mother talking with others and laughing. When I asked what was funny, the response was always that it's not funny in English. It's not only the humour that I lost out on, but also the knowledge that accompanies our language. As an adult, I've taken conversation classes and university classes, but I retained only a few words, never enough to speak or understand.
There have been two pivotal experiences that have facilitated my increased proficiency with learning my language, and both have involved language immersion techniques.
The Michif language is an endangered indigenous language, with a very small group of speakers left in western Canada who are predominantly lii vyeu, or “old ones”. Statistics Canada reported in 2016 that there were “9,710 Métis, or 1.7% of the Métis population,” who “reported being able to [converse] in an Aboriginal language....” That census also reported that out of the more than 70 aboriginal languages spoken across Canada by the 260,550 aboriginal language speakers, only 1,170 of these spoke Michif.
In his research, Peter Bakker, a linguist who studied the Michif language around 1988 to 1991, found that the Michif language is an anomaly. It does not fit into a language family with its mixture of Cree verbs and French nouns. It is neither an Algonquian language nor an Indo-European language.
He also explained that not all mixtures of French and Cree stem from the same source as Michif. He identified three types of mixtures, noting that the Cree-French or French-Cree spoken in northern areas of Saskatchewan and Alberta has no historical connection to the Michif language that is commonly referred to as southern Michif. This needs to be noted, because it has political and cultural implications.
Although the Métis National Council has identified Michif as the national language of the Métis people and our nation, Métis or Michif people also speak Nehiyawewin, or Cree; Dene; and Anishinaabemowin, or Saulteaux. If Métis communities are provided funding only for Michif, it does not honour the Cree, Dene and Saulteaux spoken in their respective communities.
The Gabriel Dumont Institute, which is the educational arm of the Métis nation in Saskatchewan, has been at the forefront of preserving the Michif language through the promotion and creation of Michif resources. Their website, metismuseum.ca, states that it “employs sociological conventions when classifying a Michif language: if a Michif person living in Saskatchewan calls their language “Michif,” then the Institute respects their wishes and calls that language “Michif”.
I've employed this same thinking about Michif in my research. My recommendations are based on the cultural and linguistic diversity that exists in our Métis communities across the Métis homeland and preliminary findings from my research.
I have completed two research projects on Michif language revitalization. The first project focused on studying the experiences of learners and fluent speakers at a land-based Michif language immersion camp. It was done in collaboration with the Gabriel Dumont Institute and SUNTEP, which stands for the Saskatchewan Urban Native Teacher Education Program, in Regina. Russell Fayant, a faculty member at SUNTEP Regina, was a co-investigator on this project.
The second study focused on effectiveness of transmitting the Michif language using video conferencing, like Zoom, in a mentor-apprentice program method by examining the experiences of the Michif language mentors and apprentices.
A major obstacle that I have encountered is appropriately compensating fluent language speakers to work as mentors and participate in language revitalization research projects. As I already mentioned, a majority of our language speakers are older. Many are receiving a pension and some are living on the guaranteed income supplement. Stipends or honorariums are considered income and therefore impact their annual income tax. These changes influence their future pension and guaranteed income supplement, so they are put in a position where if they participate, they are negatively impacted. Rather than being paid for their time and knowledge, they are penalized financially.
I recommend that the remuneration received by retired fluent indigenous language speakers not be considered income when it is used for indigenous language revitalization activities.
Second, the mentor-apprentice program has been proven to be an effective method of indigenous language transmission; however, it requires considerable time and money. If someone is interested in becoming a fluent speaker, there should be opportunities for them to take time away from work to spend those hours participating in language transmission activities with fluent speakers.
Language immersion programs are more effective than one-off language learning activities, so more needs to be done to support the immersion programs in schools, in homes and in communities. Indigenous languages need to be found in more places. We cannot rely just on schools. Communities need to be supported to create immersion programs like the mentor-apprentice program, as well as provided with resources to create videos, games, audio and television programming in the target language.
Ekosi . Marrsî. Thank you.