Tan’si Taanshii Melanie Griffith Brice nitisihkȃson Michif niya Lac Prairie ahpo Paskwa Sâkahikan kayahte ohci niya ekwa L’brossar Sâkahikan, Oskana kâ-ahsâtêki mekwac niwîki  Ni mama Audrey Morin î-tsiyihkasot ekwa ni papa Gilbert Griffith î-tsiyhkasot Niwahkômâkanak Morin, Ridsdale, Delaronde, Sansregret, Desjarlais, Beauregard, Ross, Pontibriand dit Sansregret î-tisiyihkasoyiwak Nisto nitânisak ekwa nîso nôsisimak.

Presentation by Melanie Brice

I don’t know if my language mentors watching but I’m sure I’ll have lots of corrections from that intro! As I already said, my name is Melanie Griffith Brice; I’m the mother of three adult women. Between my husband and I, we have six children and six grandchildren. I was born in Meadow Lake and grew up in Jack Fish Lake. Metinota is where I call home. Elder Elma Poitra told me that the word “metinota” means “the right place” and I just find that such a fitting description because it’s definitely the right place for me. I’m a descendant, as many people in Northern Saskatchewan are, of two well-known Métis patriarchs, Cebrian Moran and his brother Rafael Moran, and another Métis leader, Cuthbert Grant, and a lot of people who are in the South are descendants of him.

I identify more with my Michif Métis family because that was really nurtured in me due to racism and discrimination, and we definitely spent a lot more time with my mother’s family. But that’s, not to say that my dad’s culture is not important. I grew up with Jackfish Lake, which is where my dad also grew up, and I like to think of that in terms of what bell hooks calls “a culture of place.” It’s that feeling of belonging and choosing where and how to live, and it also really ties into the writing of Métis scholar Brenda MacDougal where she talks about identity. That sense of belonging to either a place or a group, and she says that identity is encompassed in one’s connection to home, be that family or the environment. This is why it’s a very common practice that we when we meet people, right we say ask: “who are your people,” “where are you from?” That connection to kinship to the land is so important.

I’m the Gabriel Dumont research chair on Michif Métis education and I’m really excited about this role, because it gives me an opportunity to build relationships between the Faculty of Education and our Métis communities; increase the capacity around Métis specific research, research on Michif language revitalization, as well as work in collaboration on research projects with Métis communities; work with Gabriel Dumont Institute in forwarding their mandate on Métis culture and education; and as well, it gives me an opportunity to work with SUNTEP (Saskatchewan Urban Native Teacher Education Program) in Regina on courses and events. And I’m a SUNTEP alumna so there’s a feeling when I go back, it’s like a little place of home on campus. And I want to acknowledge Gabriel Dumont Institute and my Dean, Dr Jerome Cranston, because if it wasn’t for all their hard work this research chair position wouldn’t exist.

This talk is going to focus on language reclamation and revitalization basically through my own story as a Michif and as a researcher. As you notice I use the term Michif instead of Métis and there’s a very good reason: often people think of Métis as mixed and that having any Indigenous ancestry makes you Métis and this perception is also continually perpetrated in our school curriculums and it becomes a catch-all phrase for anyone with any Indigenous ancestry. Which is really problematic for our Métis Nation and Chris Andersen writes about this in his 2016 publication Métis: Race, Recognition, and the Struggle for Indigenous Peoplehood, when he points out that viewing Métis through this lens of mixedness or hybridity reduces our identity to biological connections, rather than looking at us as a peoplehood and as a nation. To me it’s that looking at Métis as mixed, through that mixedness, is just another part of the colonial project right to diminish our indigeneity. I think it’s really important that we move beyond just having self-identification and look at Métis or Michif as if you have connections to distinctive social, cultural and political communities within our motherland – and I use the term motherland purposefully. Jean Teillet, the Métis scholar (and I’m hoping I get the family connections right, I think she’s also the great-great grand niece to Louis Riel) published a book in 2020 called The Northwest Is Our Mother. It’s the story of Louis Riel, her people the Métis Nation, and she puts in the front quotation: “the Northwest is also my mother it’s my mother country and I’m sure that my mother country will not kill me because a mother is always a mother of all the things on earth, the motherland is the most important and sacred to us because we inherited it from our ancestors” and that’s a quotation from Louis Riel. I bring attention to this quotation because it also stresses our connection to the land, which is very important, the land is vital to who we are, we come from the land, right? So land is our mother.

As Michif, for some people use the term Métis, we have a distinct culture of traditions and language as well as social and political structures and practices so even though you know our ethnogenesis came out of that intermarriage between European and First Nations, over time it’s evolved into this very unique culture, and I believe in contemporary contexts Métis people come from Métis people. Brenda MacDougall who I already mentioned is a Métis scholar, talks about the emergence of the Métis that the first generation of the Métis to demonstrate these qualities of our distinctiveness were probably born in the late 18th century and that gave birth to a second generation between the 1820s and 1850s. So, even though we can trace in our ancestry First Nations and European ancestors, we are called kitipîm’sonaw or kitipaymishoonaan, which means we own ourselves, we our own people, we are our own Nation.

I like to think I had a very privileged childhood spending a lot of time at the lake and at my grandparent’s ranch north of Meadow Lake. I grew up hearing Michif spoken by my mother, my aunties, uncles, grandparents and great grandparents. I was taught the Michif values of family, hard work, independence, pride, as well as humility, respect, patience and resourcefulness. My earliest sense of identity came from our many family gatherings and living at the lake, food, visiting, the singing, the dancing; a life that was centered on and connected to the land, our gardens, going berry picking. My mom’s family own cattle and similar to the writer bell hooks, I didn’t really realize the significance of a life connected to the land until I moved to the city, and then started to feel that disconnection especially to the language.

When we look at the connection of our peoples to the land it’s always been something that’s been important to us Michif people. We affirmed our identity to the land going all the way back to Cuthbert Grant in 1816 at the Battle of Seven Oaks. And then moving to 1885 and the Resistances both in 1869 in Red River and then in Batoche, but our connection to land isn’t just about like these physical locations. While they are significant, these sites of resistance, when I think of the importance of place, I’m thinking in terms of how we connect to one another through place, how we understand ourselves to be, how we come to manage our own lives, like having control over our own education or health or governance. It’s about sovereignty.

And I believe that this connection to land in this connectedness to place ties into learning from the land and working with the land with plants and animals. It connects us to one another through having shared responsibilities shared stories, you know source stories are very much steeped in the land they’re steeped in spaces and places from which they emerged. And that goes back into what I said in terms of when we ask people “who are your people,” it’s asking where your people are from, because that kinship is tied to the land and that sense of belonging is tied to the land. I feel very fortunate I had that growing up, I knew who my people are, I knew where my people came from, I knew how I belong to them and how I belonged to the land.

I grew up with that strong sense of identity, but I definitely lacked that connection through language so, even though I had this culturally rich childhood, I did not learn or speak my language, beyond a handful of survival words, other than the odd phrase spoken here and there. English was spoken a lot at family gatherings but just with my mother and her close family, and friends with that extended family, would you hear Michif.

What we see is what linguist Leanne Hinton writes about in terms of language shift, where you go from having all generations being able to speak the language to where, then, you just have grandparents who speak the language to the parents, but the parents don’t speak the language to the children. Then you have many in my generation who don’t speak or understand the language. And with most of our fluent speakers being quite elderly and as more and more of our fluent speakers die, Michif is endangered; it’s on the precipice of not being spoken in any homes. There are many languages researchers and activists who understand that strong connection between language and cultures and what we are losing, what we’re missing out on when we don’t have language: through our knowledge systems and our cultures, through our philosophy, our oral literary, our musical traditions, our environmental knowledge, all of these things that are tied to language in the land. It makes me really think about what did I miss out on by not knowing my language, how different would my experience have been in my community with my family if I spoke my language. My childhood was dominated by the English language, it was in the home, in school, on TV and as a child you’re more concerned about fitting in with everybody so you’re not too worried, all my friends spoke English.

But there were two probably two reoccurring events where I felt like I was missing out on something. The first one, of course, was at family gatherings when my mom and family would be talking in the language, and then they would start laughing and you know my cousins and I would be playing nearby, and we’d be like: what do you, what’s so funny and they’d like: no it’s not funny in English, and you know we pester them until they told us… and it wasn’t funny, right, so we didn’t understand what was making them laugh so much. The other event where I felt I was missing out on something is when my family went on an annual religious pilgrimage to Lac Ste-Anne in Alberta and a lot of like the singing and masses were in various Indigenous languages, and so, even though you would learn to sing along, you don’t really know what it is you’re saying, so that’s another time where I felt I was missing out.

The first time, I was interested in learning a language, it was actually French that I was interested in. I took French in high school, university, I went to Quebec on a six-week language immersion, and interestingly it was while I was in Quebec, I phoned home to talk to my parents and my grandparents were there visiting and my grandfather got on the phone and spoke French to me, and I don’t know why I was so surprised that he could speak French with so many Métis people being multilingual, but it made me really quite sad, not in terms missing out on knowledge, in terms of French, but that the knowledge that I was missing out on about my family, and about things that I could have learned from my grandparents through the language – I didn’t expect to get emotional!

Now as an adult right there’s this urgency to revitalize our language, to sustain our knowledge systems, to protect and preserve our culture. The current situation in Canada is that Indigenous languages are on a decline for the number of speakers. The 2016 Census reported that there are about 70 aboriginal languages spoken across Canada and only just over 1000 of these people spoke Michif so it’s a very, very small group of Michif speakers left in Western Canada, who are predominantly Old Ones.

I want to explain, also in terms of what is the Michif language, there was actually a linguist who came over to Canada and did research on Michif. He visited a number of Michif, Métis communities in Manitoba, Saskatchewan Alberta in North Dakota around 1988-89. In his research, he found that Michif was an anomaly in that it didn’t fit into any language family with its mixture of Cree verbs and French nouns, so it was neither an Algonquin language or an Indo-European language. And he writes Michif challenges all theoretical models of language, it is a language with two completely different components with separate sound systems morphological endings and syntactic rules.

According to Peter Bakker there are dialects of Michif that have very little variation and these dialects are spoken in Saskatchewan, Manitoba, and North Dakota but, despite that geographical spread, there were no problems in comprehension among the Michif speakers in these different communities. Bakker also contends that not all mixtures of French and Cree stem from the same source as the Michif language that he studied. He determined three different types of mixtures that appeared in in the different communities he visited so far apart. He identified a mixture of Cree French, which is basically Cree with a few French words and that differs from Michif and the origins of Michif (the second), and the third being those who are fluent speakers in both French and Cree and mix the two languages in different ways. There are many Métis people who are speakers and who agree with Peter Bakker in terms of that the Michif language is specific to only this very small group of speakers, and that the other mixtures are either a dialect of Cree or a dialect of French. Like Peter Bakker with writes his book that the Michif language, or the Cree he calls the Cree French mixture that’s spoken at Île-à-la-Crosse, or the French Cree mixture that’s spoken at Lac La Biche in Alberta don’t have this same historical connection or the linguistic connection to the Michif language that is spoken in the Turtle Mountain, Camperville, or Qu’Appelle Valley.

While linguistically, this may be the case, I believe that we need to look at the Michif language with a broader scope in terms of how it connects our people, to their culture and to their language. I think that Northern Michif and Southern Michif, which is our heritage Michif, which is the Michif that Peter Bakker writes about, I believe they can all exist as Michif languages. The Gabriel Dumont Institute has done significant work in the area of preserving and promoting three Michif languages that are spoken in Saskatchewan: Michif, Michif French, and Northern Michif. On their website they state: “GDI employs sociological conventions when classifying a Michif language: if a Michif person living in Saskatchewan calls their language “Michif,” than the Institute respects their wishes and calls that language ‘Michif.’” I like the way GDI has approached that.

Gabriel Dumont Institute is the official educational arm of the Métis Nation Saskatchewan. One of their programs is SUNTEP, they also have their library and the Gabriel Dumont Technical Institute. They have a publishing department and it’s through their public publishing department that they have created several Michif language resources, both in the Southern heritage Michif and the Northern Michif. They’ve published children’s books that both have English and Michif translations. Some even come with audio components so you can listen to hear the language. They’ve created the virtual museum of Métis history and culture, which has oral history, so you can go in and listen to Michif language spoken from different communities. They’ve worked with communities to create Michif dictionaries in both Southern and Northern Michif, as well as creating language apps. So they’ve done a lot of work around preserving and documenting the language.

We are at the beginning of the Decade of Indigenous languages that the United Nations has declared, from 2022 to 2032. Professor Megan Davis, who is the Chair of the Permanent forum on Indigenous issues, says “Saving Indigenous languages is crucial to ensure the protection of the cultural identity and dignity of Indigenous peoples and safeguard their traditional heritage.”

As for some of the things that are happening, there are Michif language camps, Michif language classes, both community based and in universities, there are also a few elementary schools in Saskatchewan that have Michif immersion, but it’s difficult to find teachers who are fluent speakers so sometimes those classes become more around language awareness than they are immersion, so there’s definitely a need to have teachers who are proficient Michif speakers. I was up in Île-à-la-Crosse a couple weeks ago for a Michif elder gathering that was organized by my language mentor, Vince Ahenahkew, and sponsored by Gabriel Dumont Institute. While I was there, I got to go visit Rossignol Elementary School. Mary Belanger invited me to the prekindergarten classroom and there they have three fluent Michif speakers and it was so amazing to see as soon as these three- and four-year olds entered the door, they were spoken to all in Michif. They understood when they were told to put on their shoes or go wash their hands, and it was just so incredible to see. Seeing things like this makes me wish that we could create more of that, having more fluent speakers and having it in the schools to create more speakers.

There’s definitely a lot of efforts being put into Michif language revitalization, but it’s been slow. Which is why a lot of my research then centers on Michif language revitalization in hoping that we can learn about what’s effective, what’s working so that we can use it to create more effective practices around Michif language revitalization.

I’m going to talk about to the two main research projects that I’m working on about Michif language.

The first one focuses on a Michif language immersion camp. This research project is in collaboration with SUNTEP Regina, Gabriel Dumont Institute – Russell Fayant, a faculty member at SUNTEP Regina, is a co-investigator with me on this project. The objective of our research project was to study the effectiveness of a mentor apprentice program in transmitting language by examining the experiences of the language speakers and the language learners. We crafted the research questions in collaboration with Old Ones. The mentor apprentice program, or MAP, started in California, and it was developed specifically for Indigenous languages, but you could you could use it with any language: it’s a method of learning where you have a fluent speaker, a mentor, teaching language to a language learner and apprentice in an immersion context. They spend a lot of time together, usually 10 to 15 hours a week, doing everyday kinds of things in the target language, with no English. At SUNTEP they’ve offered an Indigenous language as part of their four year degree bachelor program. Historically Michif wasn’t offered so students would have to either take Cree, Saulteaux, or Nakoda. But in 2015 Russell developed a Michif language course, and it was taught over the term so students would meet twice a week, he would bring in fluent speakers. But the Old Ones that came to the class said: this is great, this is better than nothing, but this isn’t how we learn the language. We learn it out on the land, not in the classroom, it’s through visiting and through doing things.

So Russell worked with Irma Klyne to redevelop the course into a land-based immersion camp, and they had their very first land based Michif immersion camp. It was a three-week long camp located on the land and then they were finally able to have their second immersion camp just this past May with the goal of pairing, having fluent Michif speakers mentor the adult students as apprentices so that over the three weeks the students there they had that organized into five different modules. They also, of course, had assignments connected to those different modules, but the key component was working with the Old Ones in the language camp. In 2019, most days they had three Old Ones, but some days they had up to six Old Ones to work with the students and this past May there were consistently four Old Ones that the students had access to, in addition to Irma Klyne who was an instructor along with Russell.

They had modules around visiting where students would learn how to introduce themselves, say where they’re from. Another module that they had was around the kitchen table, kitchen things: they had to learn how to cook a meal and about how they would do that all in Michif. There’s a lot of repetition, one of the modules was focused around work, so they would focus on words around doing things and tasks. George Fayant (I don’t know if you’re familiar with him), he builds Red River carts; he came out with one of his Red River cart models and showed the students how that worked, and the Old Ones were there to give them the words for wheel and axle and things like that in Michif. They also had another model, called “la terre / on the land” where the students would learn about plants and have to go and find plants and translate the names of the plants and how they are used, all in Michif. One of my favorite parts of that part of the Michif immersion camp was Irma translated the words to Patsy Cline’s “I Fall to Pieces,” and so the students learned how to sing that song and it was just great to hear the students sing – and I don’t know if any of them knew who Patsy Cline was before having to sing that song in Michif! Then they ended off with a celebration, where the students prepared all the food and performed dances, they learned square dancing, and invited family and friends to come and demonstrated the language learning that they had.

It’d be great to have more camps like this that exist over like a long period of time, three weeks, the students were out there for six hours a day. I think that would definitely help in terms of increasing the number of proficient speakers, and have that follow up: these students have the desire to continue learning.

One of the really interesting findings from the first summer was that the Old Ones were talking about how proud they were in their language; that they grew up not being proud to speak their language, but hearing the students use it made them feel proud. They were just so proud to see these young students become Michif teachers. And the students really appreciated the opportunity to be out on the land, because it doesn’t have obviously the same restrictions of being in the classroom; having access to the Old Ones to learn how to speak the language. I just love this one quotation: “I only came because it was mandatory but now I see the value of learning on the land and I’m so happy I got to be here and learn from the Old Ones” The students also talked about how they are afraid of what they would lose if they didn’t keep up with the language learning. It was amazing to see their growth from the beginning of the camp to the end of the three weeks.

The second language revitalization program that I’m working on, is using the mentor apprentice model for Michif language transmission over Zoom. It was the pandemic that pushed me towards that one, because of course you can be meeting face to face and that’s the best place to learn language of course, face to face. It was studying the effectiveness of using the mentor apprentice program model using video conferencing like Zoom to transmit the language. As I said earlier, in the mentor apprentice model, you need at least 10 to 15 hours a week that the mentor and apprentice need to spend together. That’s a huge sort of time commitment, so for this study I just asked the participants to try to do six hours a week. But the other neat part is, I decided to be a participant in this research project. I want to learn my own language so I thought this was a great opportunity. We have a mentor and apprentice working on Northern Michif and so I was the apprentice in Northern Michif and then we had a mentor and apprentice working on Southern Michif and then we would meet as a group, once a month, just to talk about things that we were doing to learn the language and challenges that we are experiencing. The greatest challenge was Internet connectivity, the freezing and all of those things that happen or the connection drops, this is not very helpful when you’re trying to listen to your mentor say something or you’re trying to say something back. But it was a really great experience.

My language mentor is a retired principal; he taught Michif in high schools, so he had a lot of resources. We would spend time on Zoom, where you can share screen, so we’d share pictures and we talked about what was in the pictures. He would say something in Michif and then I would be using the “annotate” feature to circle it or find it. Or, I would say what I could see and at the beginning, where you’re just saying “I see a rabbit” to then eventually being able to say, “I see a white rabbit with two ears and a tail,” just continually doing that progression. We will try to do as much of it as possible in Michif starting off, sometimes just talking about the weather, what we did yesterday, what we plan to do later; we play checkers online since there’s an online way you can play cards and checkers. We also read stories in Michif and then looked at, trying to sort of translate them into English. He also would call other fluent speakers on the phone and have conversations with them and Michif that I would then listen to and try to figure out what it was that they were saying and it was a really great project to not only be the researcher, but the participant.

I found for my own language learning the turning point for me was first off not worrying about writing everything down. At the beginning I was trying to write every everything that he said. Then, once let go of that, as well as trying to make sense of everything, like “well why do you say it like that,” and “why do you say this here,” decided to abandon the notions that we have from our English education – that’s when I was starting to be able to feel that I could use the language a lot more, when I moved away from those things. It was an amazing experience that we just finished, because it was over a year, you know so I’m happy that I was a participant because it created that space and time for me to work on becoming a language speaker. I said this in interview, when I was at the kindergartner or the pre-K room, the three and four year olds, I felt this is exactly the level I am, this works for me. But my language mentor Vincent was far more generous and says no you’re probably about a grade 1 but I honestly thought, no, no, I think pre-K is where my language abilities are.

As I said earlier, I always have felt like I belonged within my culture, within my community, but learning my language brought on a renewed sense of connection, a greater sense of belonging. I’ve been to Île-à-la-Crosse to visit a few times, and being able to talk with Elders – they tell stories and their stories come from the land and they share their knowledge about the land… and I’m not from there, I have family connections, ancestral connections to Île-à-la-Crosse, but you still feel a feeling of connection, a feeling of belonging, not so much to that specific location, but through the language, a sense of relationship, that kinship, to the spaces and places that other Michifs inhabit.

Dr Angela Weenie, in a chapter that she wrote on decolonizing education, she quoted Willie Ermine where he talks about learners experiencing heightened sensitivities about themselves and their environment when they’re doing land-based education, and I think that really also connects to language learning as well because I feel that I have an enhanced understanding about myself and about my connection to my community and I deepened that connection to the land and to my people.

There’s all sorts of challenges that face Michif language revitalization and access to speakers, we have a limited number of fluent speakers. Just in the last couple years there are two Michif speakers who were very much involved with Russell’s language camp who died. That just really puts into stark perspective how we’re at a state of emergency to create more language speakers. Also, for access, if you don’t live near fluent speakers, Zoom came in handy, but then you have to also provide the technology to your fluent speakers and have that Internet connectivity. Another challenge is there isn’t a standard orthography, there’s not a standard writing system, there’s their various writing systems based on dialects. With English, because there’s a standard orthography, it doesn’t matter if the speaker is Australian English or Canadian English or English from England, we’re able to read it, because of that standard orthography. But when you start writing based on dialect it definitely makes it a lot more challenging for a learner who’s trying to access those resources to learn the language. Heather Souter is a Michif language activist and in her center, Prairies to Woodland Indigenous Language Revitalization Circle, she really is like advocating for having that standard orthography as a way to help learners with the language.

The other challenge I also see, is the university courses. The university is a Western institution, so language classes need to adhere to certain policies in terms of how the courses are put together. How do we make language courses that are going to create more of our speakers? You look at what Russell has done with moving it out on to the land, because just getting together once or twice a week isn’t enough to create proficient speakers. To me it’s like you’re saying you’re Indigenizing but you’re still getting the Indigenous to fit within that Western paradigm within that Western structure, so there is hope with the land-based education and the immersion camps, things that take us beyond the four walls and help us connect to our language.

A Conversation between Emily Grafton and Melanie Brice

Emily Grafton: Thank you so much Melanie, I’ll give you a moment to catch your breath and drink some water. There’s so much that you spoke about! First of all I want to say your Michif introduction was amazing. I thought it was brilliant and I do want to introduce myself to the audience because, while I recognize many names on our call today – and I also just want to give a shout out to those folks who have been joining us regularly, thank you so much we appreciate the commitment that you’ve given in coming to these live events – but I do want to sort of introduce myself as a citizen of the Michif nation. So much of what you spoke about really resonated with me on a personal level. Melanie and I are obviously colleagues here at the University of Regina so we have some shared experiences in terms of Indigenizing the Western Academy. I also want to just talk about, in terms of those shared experiences, like when you spoke about those feelings, those moments that you missed out because of the language with your family, it just really spoke to me; you got emotional, I got emotional as well. It really spoke to me. I’m from a different territory than Melanie grew up in; I grew up in Winnipeg so I’m an urban Métis person. My dad’s family is Red River I’m at a very, very French place, and so I am the only – myself and my two siblings – are the only out of 35 of my cousins who didn’t go to French immersion. So I didn’t understand when we came together as a family, because it was in French, with some Michif. I learned a lot today about the differing Michif dialects and how some lean more towards Cree some lean more towards French. But it also made me think about stories that my father told me about when he would go to school, as a young child and get in trouble for the way he spoke and the way he would spell things and realizing that that influence of the Michif coming through and – so yes, I got emotional as well.

I want to shift from situating myself to your wonderful talk to maybe getting to some questions, and let me take a moment to see if the audience has any questions; as those questions come in, I will pose them to Melanie but I’ll start with my own questions, while I wait.

Something I’ve been thinking about a little bit and so I’m really excited to have this opportunity to sit with a learned Michif scholar to bounce this idea off of and see if you have any thoughts, but I’ve really noticed since I’m moving territories, so being wonderfully welcomed into Treaty 4 territory, this idea that the Métis nation, the Métis people are very homogenous. You’ve illustrated for us the way the language differs across much of this territory that is the Métis homeland, but I’ve really just been noticing this real interest in fleshing out the distinctions between First Nations people, which is wonderful and so important when we think about the distinctions between language, history with colonialism, and relationship to place. But I’ve just been wondering: will we get to a point where maybe we add a little more specificity to who we understand as the Métis people or the Michif nation. So I pass that over to you: do you think that there’s a way to get there, where we recognize more of the distinctiveness across the Métis nation?

Melanie Brice: I think we definitely could move towards that, and I think it’s through language, because, of course, even when you look across our nation, the Michif language and how it’s influenced by our communities are influenced by where they are, what communities are nearby, in terms of French speaking Métis communities, or if they’re closer to Saulteaux First Nations, then you’re going to see that influence, or closer to Cree communities you’re going to see those kinds of influences in our language, which do add to that distinctiveness. I always found it interesting that, even though I’m raised up in the Northwest and then talking to you know who are called my cousins right here in the south, there are similarities in how we go about things, how we think about things as Michifs. I think that that distinctiveness does come through in the language.

Emily Grafton: When I was doing my PhD in Winnipeg, I met this woman in one of my classes, a Métis from northern Manitoba, and the two of us went and volunteered at the University of Winnipeg pow-wow one year and we were there was some jigging happening, and she just shook her head, this is not how we jig up North. So yes, distinctions.

I wonder if we could shift the conversation more to our broader theme of our series around living land acknowledgements. And maybe I can just pop a few questions out for you: do you have any perspectives on land acknowledgments?

Melanie Brice: Oh, well, I don’t think that Indigenous people from the territory that they’re residing in need to acknowledge the land, so I always get really frustrated when settlers, will say “Oh, we need an Indigenous person to do the land acknowledgement” and well, no, it’s for the visitors, right? You acknowledge that you are not from this land. And the other part, is it’s become so very scripted, it’s been written out, it’s very neat, it’s very tidy, where I think that the land acknowledgments in order to be meaningful really need to come from the heart: how you as an individual would acknowledge the original peoples of this land. I think that’s what it, it needs to be made more meaningful so that it actually resonates with the people from the land, as opposed to it just being something that’s read and that you know people just think “oh there’s the land acknowledgment, I can send one more text or I can do something else and aren’t really listening, I think, by saying what that land means to you as a visitor, as a settler, as a newcomer to that space. I think that would make it far more meaningful.

Emily Grafton: I really like what you say about resonance and having the acknowledgement resonate. At various points during your talk, your description of places as an extension of kinship and relationship expressed through language, expressed through other cultural facets, really spoke to me. One thing that I’ve often thought about when it comes to land acknowledgments and the importance of them is in our Indigenous families and communities, as you said, the question of who are you who are your people, where is your land is so integral. A big shift that happened for me when I moved from Treaty one territory to Treaty four territory was that I just sort of became a Métis person. Folks stopped asking me “who’s your family” and at first, I thought it was because probably people wouldn’t know who my families are. The names Lafreniere, Labossiere are lesser known here, and so I was okay with that but, over time I my heart really yearned for that simple question and just to speak my family’s names and tell folks about my land.

And I’ve often wondered, in reflection on that sort of experience and that desire to share more of myself beyond the label “Métis,” if some of that can be and should be sort of wrapped into our territorial acknowledgments, as you said, not just that script but that real deep connection to why Indigenous peoples state who they are and where they come from.

Melanie Brice: What you’re saying reminded me of growing up, when you would say who you are, and people of my mother’s generation, from that name they know exactly what community you’re from: “oh you’re from here,” “oh that’s your last name, Morin, okay well there’s quite a few Morins in the north, you’re going to be, Meadow Lake, Île-à-la-Crosse.” There’s an understanding of where different people come from you know through their name.

Emily Grafton: Absolutely, yes.

Emily Grafton: We have an audience question coming in and it reads: Is kinship for Métis people limited to Métis communities, can there be kinship across nations or kinship that are created?

Melanie Brice: That’s interesting! Through some of the concepts created there’s definitely kinship across nations. I have cousins who are at Canoe Lake First Nation. Unfortunately with the colonial systems and how things are you can’t identify as both, right, you’ve got to pick one and you’re either Status or Treaty or citizen of the Métis nation. That has created a lot of divisions between us. When we look at our kinship, it’s going beyond those Western notions of what family is. Even if I think about people that I would call auntie and uncle; these are not biological relations, these aren’t the siblings of my parents. But this is a familial connection that we have and so those are the kinship ties. If you think of kinship that’s created, it comes out of that place of belonging, of knowing who you are and how you have come to know yourself and who you belong to.

Emily Grafton: And I would say, just to add to this idea of kinship created. You mentioned outcomes of the colonial state on membership and citizenship. So many of those non-familial familial relationships, or those created blood relatives that I have, are due to the colonial state breaking families and non-Indigenous families adopting Indigenous children into their family and needing to maintain that kind of sense of cultural identity and so relationships are forged with my family. I have a group of cousins who call my parents uncle and grandma, which makes no sense, right, but that’s the love bond that was forged amongst those people and myself with those kids.

Emily Grafton: Then we have another audience question: Can you share the connection of language with other items that indicate kinship and sense of belonging, especially with the ribbon dress?

Melanie Brice: I don’t know too much in terms of the ribbon dress, that wasn’t part of my upbringing. I know Leah Dorion has done a lot of work in that in that area. And when you follow people on social media like Instagram, you can just see beautiful creations. Whether it has always been something that was tied to a particular, maybe two particular Métis communities, wasn’t found or consistent across all Métis communities in that way, the same way if you think of the Red River cart, which is quite a very strong symbol right. Well that was mostly used in the plains, not so much in the north, but then you look at voyageurs, which also is a very strong symbol, well that wouldn’t be so much in the south, but a lot more in the north or along the river systems. The interesting connection, would be the sash, that sort of has South and North, it has been quite consistent across how it was used right, on trap lines, it’s the prairie toolbox to tie things up and things like that. The fiddle, again, that was quite used across many Métis communities. There probably are things that would be specific to a certain community; the ribbon skirt that’s not something that I grew up with in my community, but it’s not to say it’s not part of somebody else’s. It’s similar to when I think of like how when we offer tobacco, it’s a very traditional offering, but in my family, it was customary to bring tea, so tea was what you brought when you wanted to talk. Now there’s Métis communities Elders who do both tobacco and tea. So you know there is some of that distinctiveness as well in different communities.

Emily Grafton: Can we talk a little bit more about how we adapt in terms of these protocols, tea or tobacco, because one of the things that’s so interesting about Regina is that in the heart of Treaty 4 territory there are so many distinct Indigenous nations sharing this space and it’s quite frankly a small city. It’s maybe not unique, but it is quite unique in terms of all of the distinct nations, languages and protocol practices, and so, and then, when you were talking about northern Saskatchewan versus southern Saskatchewan and some of the different symbols that would correspond with the Métis and Michif Nations, as you sort of move across territories and move in and out of different kinship circles, how do you respectfully take up these protocols and practices?

Melanie Brice: Oh well, you know we’re raised, of course, to have that humility, so you ask in a respectful way. You watch. Watching is the big thing to see what are the customs, the protocols, the traditions within that particular community. You don’t just jump right in and assert your own ways or your own thinking. You sit back until you learn how things go in that community. When we look at coming together in the city of Regina, with so many different nations, it’s also drawing on the similarities, the things that bring us together as Indigenous people as well, so there are commonalities right across nations that allow us to come together at the same time as honoring each nation’s own traditions and customs and practices.

Emily Grafton: Thank you for that response.

Emily Grafton: I have one final question here; audience, I will give you a few moments, while I ask this question, to see if there are any final questions. But Melanie I want you to talk a little bit about how you described your experience with the language and how you’ve always felt that you’ve belonged culturally in the Michif Nation and how learning the language as you described it – I almost felt like what you were saying was you became intuitive to speak the language, instead of trying to write it down and memorize these rules, you sort of took it in a different direction. I’m really curious about this because, in my experience, I’ve never studied Michif. When I went to university it wasn’t offered, but a requirement in my program was studying Cree so I studied Cree for two years, and I am the worst Cree speaker, you could imagine but anyhow, I had a quite a visceral experience learning Cree and I started to dream in Cree, and I often describe it as realizing that I had been living my life in a two-dimensional world, and when I learned the language, all of a sudden, it was three dimensional. And a lot of my research is around Community, well specifically youth and bringing youth and Elders or Old Ones together to facilitate that well being through intergenerational teaching, sharing the stories, language revitalization. And so I wonder just given that you are on this journey of learning your language and it’s having this sort of interesting effect on your positionality to being a Michif person: How do you see that that taking up of one’s language reflected in community well being, in particular for you through those little folks that that are in a nursery school that you met.

Melanie Brice: I think that through language is how we have our identity, and how we use language tells people who we are and what we’re about. It allows us as well, then, to have that sense of belonging, to know that we are part of something that’s bigger than ourselves. I found it just very interesting. The other apprentice in my research study and I, we were talking about how it was when we finally moved away from our sort of Western notions of thinking, that was the turning point to be able to really embrace the language and allow the language to embrace us and then through that embrace, then you have that sense that you’re getting somewhere, whether it’s on your language journey or your connection. And you know even visiting with other Michif from other communities, whenever you make any attempts with the language they’re just so welcoming, they’re just so receptive, and they just so want you to learn, and they are so willing to teach. It just really enhances that sense of belonging that you are doing what you are supposed to be doing.

Emily Grafton: I know I said that was the final question, but if I could just ask a final question Part B. You mentioned that shift from abandoning that Western approach to learning and I wonder if you would just share with us a little bit around the different ontologies, Western versus Indigenous.

Melanie Brice: Because of going through school, you’re taught things, we sometimes think of language learning like when we go to kindergarten we’re taught the colors and the numbers. But the thing is when we go to kindergarten, we already know the language, so we can approach language learning in that same way as sending kids off to kindergarten where they’re already doing this, they’re already speakers right. So it’s looking at how we go about language learning in ways that make sense to our being, and one of the things was not trying to write everything down, it’s thinking about the words in a different way, not trying to find some English approximation to it, but thinking about using those words within context, how you would use them and then because there’s words… I always get frustrated – I’d say to my language mentor, because he would teach me a word, and then I would use it and he’s like “no you don’t use that word there you use it over here” and it’s like “but I thought it meant this.” Within that, then you start to learn there’s a different knowledge system, there’s a different way of looking at things, because you’re going to be using words differently.

Emily Grafton: Thank you very much for that, Melanie, I’ve really enjoyed learning more about your research, I’ve learned a lot and I really appreciate the ways that you describe place in connection with kinship. I hope that our audience has enjoyed the conversation as much as I have. Audience, I thank you again for coming out today and enjoy the rest of your day.

Cited works

Andersen, Chris. “Métis”: Race, Recognition, and the Struggle for Indigenous Peoplehood. Vancouver: UBC Press, 2014.

Bakker, Peter. A Language of Our Own. The Genesis of Michif, the Mixed Cree-French Language of the Canadian Métis. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997.

Hinton, Leanne and Meek, Barbra A., “Language Acquisition, Shift, and Revitalization Processes in the USA and Canada,” in Indigenous Language Revitalization in the Americas, Coronel-Molina, Serafín M. and McCarty, Teresa L., eds., 57-75. London: Routledge, 2016

hooks, bell. Belonging. A Culture of Place. London: Routledge, 2009.

Johnson, Bonny and Dorion, Leah Marie. sînapân kîskasâkâs: A Guide to Making Contemporary-Style Métis Ribbon Skirts. Saskatoon: Gabriel Dumont Institute, 2021.

MacDougall, Brenda. One of the Family: Metis Culture in Nineteenth-Century Northwestern Saskatchewan. Vancouver: UBC Press, 2010.

Teillet, Jean. The North-West Is Our Mother: The Story of Louis Riel’s People, the Métis Nation. New York: Patrick Crean Editions, 2019.

Weenie, Angela. “Askiy Kiskinwahamākēwina: Reclaiming Land-based Pedagogies in the Academy,” in Decolonizing and Indigenizing Education in Canada, Cote-Meek, Sheila, and Moeke-Pickering, Taima, eds., 3-18. Toronto: Canadian Scholars’ Press, 2020.