For us and Métis, Michif is our national language. It is one of the languages that is being lost and could possibly become extinct, because there are fewer and fewer Michif speakers all the time.
Our language is a part of our culture; that's what makes us who we are. Our language is a living language; it's a language made up of verbs. If somebody were to tell you a story in our language, you will see a bunch of people sitting in a room who understood the language just roar with laughter at the story. If they were to translate it into English, it wouldn't sound funny any more. So it really is a living language and a part of who we are, a part of our culture. It is being lost, as we have fewer and fewer Michif speakers who can share and translate it.
In fact, in our Métis communities in my generation, my grandmother only spoke Cree and my great grandmother never spoke any English at all, only a Cree-French mix, which is Michif. We understood everything she said, but we were not allowed to speak it, because it would identify us and target us for the racism that came to be. And it was because they had been in the residential schools and had the experience that their languages were bad, so they would only talk in their language amongst themselves and family. For my generation, often the words we learned were from the dirty jokes that were told, in words we weren't supposed to say, but they were the words we would pick up.
So it's really important now that we develop programming, and we are trying to do that, so that our young people will be able to take that part of our culture and grow with it. Without our language, we lose a piece of our culture and our heritage.