The Turtle Mountain Michif: A People and Their Language

I first learned that not all members of the Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewa on the Turtle Mountain Reservation in northern North Dakota were Chippewa while studying linguistics and anthropology and the University of North Dakota in Grand Forks. A lovely woman named Roseanne Swenson came to the Native American Languages class I was in, and taught us some Michif, which is the term North Dakota Michif use for Metis. Metis is a French word meaning "mixed," generally applied to people of mixed European and Indian blood, and at Turtle Mountain, it is mixed Cree and French, although they consider themselves Michif, not Cree or French. The word Michif actually comes from the French word Metis; in Canadian French a central "t" often has the sound of English "ch;" no one can adequately explain the final "f" in Michif, although if you look at handwriting from the 18th and 19th centuries, you'll see that the letter "s" often looks like today's "f," and that may be part of the reason.

When I chose Linguistics as my program for my Master's degree, choosing the fascinating language of the Michif people (which is also called Michif) for my thesis topic seemed to come naturally. With the help of my old friend Roseanne (whose last name is Swenson because she married a Norwegian bachelor farmer from the Red River Valley of the North), I met a number of people on the Turtle Mountain Reservation who kindly welcomed me into their homes, told me stories, and taught me some of their language during the summer of 1982; they include, but aren't limited to, Irene LaFramboise, Patline Laverdure, and Ida Rose Allard. I was the first white person, with the possible exception of Dr. John Crawford, then a professor at UND, who had spent more than a day on the reservation specifically to learn about Michif, although many other researchers have written about it. A Michif-English Dictionary was written by Dr. Crawford along with Ida Rose Allard and Patline Laverdure in 1983, but it says little or nothing about how the language works, or why it is whatever it is. A Canadian linguist, Dr. Richard Rhodes, had spent an afternoon there in the mid-1970s, according to my informants, but they all said that in his article, "French Cree: A Case of Borrowing" he got it all wrong (the article is published in Actes du Huitieme Congres des Algonquiinistes, 1977, Carleton University, Ottawa, Canada). (I should mention that there are other groups of Metis speaking a similar, but distinctly different, form of the language across Canada and in Minnesota, but I didn't include them in my research, so everything about the language here refers only to the Michif on the Turtle Mountain Reservation.)

Michif presents a problem to linguists, because it doesn't fit their tidy little rules. According to linguistic theory, which might as well have been etched in stone as I was writing, when two languages meet, they combine in a specific way. Reinecke (1964:534) states "When men of different speech are thrown into contact,... four differnt courses are open to them." He goes on to say that these courses are dispensing with speech altogether, using a third language both groups know, the learning by one group of the language of the other, or the development of a pidgin or trade jargon which may subsequently creolize. I have noted that dispensing with speech was common at least until the 19th century among Plains Indians, who used sign language to communicate with people from different tribes; using a third language both groups know works well as a simple translation function, working one to one, or in very small groups, but is impractical with large groups, although Latin was the Lingua Franca of the entire Roman Empire, from Judea to Britain; the replacement of one language by the other, sadly, has been happening to Native Americans since the first European contact: many aboriginal languages have completely disappeared, having been replaced by English or in some cases in the Southwest by Spanish; and the development of a pidgin, with or without creolization following it has occurred all over the globe. But none of these happened when the Cree met, and subsequently married, the French trappers and traders in central and western Canada.

If Canada had chosen its second national language on the basis of number of speakers, it would have been Cree rather than French. Cree is still spoken on Reserves and in cities across Canada, and Cree speakers outnumber French speakers in Canada. French Canadian is certainly still spoken, primarily in the province of Quebec. And Metis, or Michif, is spoken from Manitoba west to Alberta. No pidgin or Creole, per se, developed.

For those asking what the heck is a pidgin or a Creole, "Isn't a pidgin a bird, and hey, I thought Creole was something from Louisiana?" (it is, but it's more!), let me first say that there are just about as many definitions of pidgin and Creole as there are linguists studying them. Probably the clearest definition of a pidgin is by Reinecke (1964: 534): "an imperfect approximation to one of the languages in a contact situation." David DeCamp wrote that pidgins have "a limited vocabulary, an elimination of many grammatical devices such as number and gender, and a drastic reduction of redundant features" (1971: 15) The vocabulary is usually limited to the words needed for trade or basic communication, and grammar is practically non-existent. Loreto Todd added that the vocabulary of a pidgin comes almost entirely from one language, while Keith Whinnom (1971: 2) adds that the (limited) grammar comes from the language that didn't provide the vocabulary - a characteristic also typical of Creoles. Pidgins are generally short-lived, either disappearing or creolizing, and used primarily for trade purposes only. Chinook Jargon in the Pacific Northwest of North America, "Kitchen Kafir" in Natal, Africa, and Papuan Motu in New Guinea are all examples of pidgins. Pidgins aren't the first language of anyone; they are learned and used between cultures. As you'll see if you keep reading, none of these things are true of Michif.

Creoles, in contrast and using a simplified explanation, are first languages that develop when two (or more) linguistically and culturally distinct groups are in contact for a long time. DeCamp writes that "creole is the native language of most of its speakers" and that creoles "have derived most of (their) vocabulary from one or more European languages" (1971: 15-16). The two groups are almost always European and non-European, and the Creole typically uses the vocabulary of the European language with a simplified grammar of the non-European language(s). Examples of these are French and Spanish Creoles that can be found in the southeastern U.S. and in the Caribbean, using either indigenous languages or African languages as the grammar source. Also, in general, the Europeans in such a situation were economically better off than the other population, and in many cases, the other population consisted of slaves, who were often forbidden to speak their native language. Sadly, this is the typical action and attitude of imperialist European (including British) colonization, and has continued through American history as well.

With both pidgins and Creoles, the earliest date of use and the inputting languages (sometimes more than two) are usually easy to define - pidgins date to some point just after first contact between the groups, and historically we know the ethnicity of the groups that came into contact. Some linguists insist that Creoles all began as pidgins, but a thorough study shows that this is not always the case. William E. Welmers wrote that "conditions for the origin of a pidgin and eventually a creole language are... a linguistically heterogeneous community with no predominant native language, and intense pressure to communicate within the community as well as with native speakers whose vocabulary the community adopts" (1973:13).

Michif, as a first language, is obviously not a pidgin. But it doesn't fit the pattern of Creoles, either. All Michif nouns, with the exception of some kinship terms and a couple of other words, are French in origin. The French words may not sound French at first hearing (for example, the Michif for horse is "zhvoo" while the French is "cheval"), but they are French, as are the articles and the adjectives. But Michif grammar includes the gender of French words, so "Le" (pronounced in Michif as "lee") is used with masculine nouns, like "garso"(with a nasal "o"; "boy"), while "la" is used with feminine nouns like "boosh" (la bouche, the mouth), and the adjectives are given the appropriate endings.

Interestingly, these French nouns are also assigned a Cree gender - either animate, like "cooking pot" (really) or inanimate, like "door." Why? Because all the verbs are Cree in origin. The verb system is completely Cree, and Cree verbs have markers (prefixes and suffixes) for animate and inanimate. The entire, and frighteningly complex for non-native-Cree speakers, Cree verb system is present in Michif and not at all simplified. Like English, Cree has transitive and intransitive verbs (a transitive verb takes an object; for example, "I kissed my baby;" while non-transitive verbs don't, "I walked to the store" in which "to the store" is an adverb describing the action of walking, and not an object at all). I've mentioned that gender is marked on verbs, so that in "I hit the girl", which is transitive animate, or TA, the last syllable, or suffix, of the verb is different from the suffix of the same root word in "I hit (knocked on) the door," with is transtive inanimate, or TI. (I'll let you imagine Intransitive Animate and Intransitive Inanimate verbs.) Like French or English, Cree pronouns include first person (I, je), first person plural (we, nous), second person (you, tu), and second person plural (you, or in some parts of the U.S., youse, and vous in French); but in third person (he, she, it, in English, they in the plural) Cree has third person proximate (closer to you, or in focus, the focus of the sentence) and third person obviate (or distant). Most European languages don't have these forms marked on verbs, but we do on demonstrative pronouns; we would say, for example, "this guy" (proximate) and "that guy over there" (obviate); or "this apple" (proximate) and "that apple." In Michif as in Cree, they are marked on verbs as well as on demonstrative prounouns, which in Michif are Cree, while personal pronouns (I, you, he) are French.

Another aspect of Cree grammar is that Cree doesn't have adjectives as such. Instead, it has what are called "verbs of being" and are dependent clauses on the noun they describe. A Cree sentence might then translate to "I gave him the apple, which is being red," or "The man, who was being angry, hit the dog." But these forms are seldom used in today's Michif; this is one place where speakers tend to stick with the simpler French adjective form, which differentiates between masculine and feminine nouns in its ending, but is much easier than the Cree form. However, they alsosometimes use the Cree verbs of being (a redundancy, which shouldn't occur, according to "the rules," in either a pidgin or a Creole). The verbs of being in Cree indicate by affixes whether the noun being described is animate or inanimate, but doesn't show the French gender (confused yet? I'll stop with the grammar now. If you want more, contact me!).

When linguists study a language, the vast majority of them look at it out of context; that is, they look just at the language, and not the people who speak it or their culture. Having studied anthropology, I find that this approach misses an enormous amount of information. By looking at Michif through the people who speak it, how they live now, and their history, I believe I understand why Michif is the way it is, and what I call a mixed language, rather than a Creole, or as Rhodes described it, a dialect of Cree that borrowed from French. I think that if a language "borrows" an entire grammatical category, complete with all aspects of that category (in this case, the noun, pronouns, and adjectives) from one language, it is much more than a dialect of the other language. He could just as easily have said that it is a dialect of French that borrowed from Cree - although of course most Michif don't look French, do they? (Am I sneakily calling him racist? Maybe.)

When imperial Europe invaded Asia, Africa, the Americas, and Polynesia, they brought with them an assumption of superiority. They believed the indigenous populations were "savage" or "primitive" and needed to be "civilized" by these ethno-centric, biased Europeans. They came as conquerors and invaders, and generally succeeded in conquering indigenous peoples and reducing their numbers while increasing the numbers of Europeans with colonists and armies. It was natural for them to force their languages - or at least their vocabularies - on the conquered rather than bothering to learn their languages (with the exception of a few individuals). Even when they began as traders, as they did in Africa, Asia, and Polynesia, Europeans expected the indigenous people to learn their words - and they did. This led to pidgins and to Creoles. In the case of all the established Creoles that have been studied, described, and written about, there are two strongly influencing factors: a need to communicate between groups of people with no common language, and a dependence by the native or enslaved population on the more powerful and more prestigious, and in all but a very few cases, European population whose vocabulary they have adopted.

Michif developed in an entirely different way. In the early to mid 1600s, what is now western Canada was a vast and uncharted wilderness. A handful of French traders and voyageurs went into the area to trap animals whose skins were valued in Europe, like the beaver. They encountered a few hostile indigenous people, but most were simply curious about these pale newcomers with the strange colored eyes and funny clothes. In the earliest years, many of the traders didn't survive the harsh winters of the region. They quickly learned to adopt the customs and living style of the native population, particularly the Cree (and other Algonquian-language groups) who dominated the area, and often took Cree wives. Their children were the first of the Metis. The traders were a small group not yet backed up by military or settlements of the French; the Cree were the dominant people in the area, and without them, the French would not have survived. The indigenous population, the Cree, didn't need the French at first contact, nor did they feel a need to communicate with them; the need to communicate and the economic dependence was the other way around. Later, when the Hudson's Bay and North West Companies established trading posts and settlements in the area, establishing a larger population, the Metis were still not dependent on the Europeans. Although many worked for them, acting as much-needed (by the French and English) interpreters and guides, most others did not. Further, they were surrounded by other indigenous peoples, the Cree and Chippewa from whom they were in part descended, and whose languages (the Cree, at the very least) made up about half of their language, in both vocabulary and grammar. Finally, the Metis or Michif were not at the bottom of the prestige ladder; they were fairly firmly entrenched in the middle, with some individuals at both the most and least prestigious positions. One Metis man actually served as the mayor of Winnipeg for a time.

Another influencing factor is that most of the Metis were bilingual - actually trilingual, speaking Metis, Cree or Chippewa, and French or English; many of them still are. They had no need to adopt the European language, unless they were using it formally; they could and did already speak it, but they maintained their own language among themselves. Michif is not and was not a contact language in the sense that it was used in a contact situation between groups with no common language; it was and is used in the homes of Metis and between Metis, and only rarely between Metis and European. The European population felt no urge to learn it, and the Metis, along with many Cree, Chippewa, and other indigenous peoples, learned the European languages and spoke them fairly fluently when speaking to Europeans. So, if you're following my logic, Michif is the result of contact between French and Cree, but was never used for that contact, as Creoles are. Finally, the rise of a feeling of Metis nationalism and the development of an ethnic identity distinct from both the Cree and the French (see discussion below) may also have contributed to the development of the Michif language.

No one can say with certainty why nouns and adjectives were adopted from French, and verbs from Cree, but I have a two-part theory. First, the French nouns are often shorter and easier to use and pronounce than their Cree equivalents, which are often nominalized verb forms (that is, nouns made out of verbs). For example, it is much easier to say "fenet" (from French "fenetre" or window) than "waapamon-apisk-w," literally "bright mirror stone" with the "w" ending signifying a noun. Second, the French wanted things, artifacts, stuff from the Cree, and the Cree wanted things from the French. It seems fairly natural to me that the Cree would first learn the French words for things they didn't have, like metal knives and pots, glass beads, guns, ammunition, woven cloth, and so on, and then perhaps move on to other things. As to why the verbs remain Cree, if you followed the simplified (yes, simplified) description of grammar above, you will have seen that verbs are central to the Cree language, and Cree is central to Michif, and also perhaps because Cree verbs seem, to me and my informants at least, to express actions more precisely than French verbs. And since the early French lived with the Cree, taking Cree wives and raising their mixed blood children, returning east only occasionally and for short periods of time, it also seems natural to me that they would learn the Cree words for ways of living and doing things - the verbs.

Interestingly, my language informants told me that modern Michif speakers who speak more French than Cree are considered better educated (by Les Soeurs, the nuns who operated and taught in the Catholic school started by Father Belcourt, a missionary in the early 1800s), and thus as having higher prestige, than those whose vocabulary contains more Cree. And while they would never openly disrespect their Chippewa neighbors, they sometimes refer to them, privately and among themselves, as "li sovazh" or "the savages."

Looking at the history of the Michif ancestral home in central and western Canada, most of the French traders and voyageurs stayed in the Red River area of what is now Manitoba, rather than returning to eastern Canada at some point, and when western Canada came under the British government, they still remained. In 1808, the English Lord Selkirk was given a grant of 116,000 square miles in what is now Manitoba and northern Minnesota to establish a colony, and he reserved one-tenth of that land for people who had worked for the Hudson's Bay Company for at least three years. Since that company had become an institution in the area by the late 1700s, many of the Metis fit that category, and were given land on which they built homes, and hunted, trapped, traded, or farmed. The Metis population grew much more quickly than the British or French population, and soon outnumbered them. Metis children tended to follow the professions of their European fathers, and while some became hunters and trappers, many were sent to eastern Canada or even Europe for an education which frequently included college. There were Metis lawyers, bankers, accountant, surgeons, and politicians; one Metis man held a position of authority in the Hudson's Bay Company, and the (white) daughter of the first white woman in the area married a Metis. Arthur Morton wrote that in the Red River Valley (of the North) settlement, the Metis formed "a respectable middle class, rather than the outcasts the Canadian public envisaged" (1938: 41).

Whatever the differences between the French or English speaking Metis, they had what Stanley (1978: 68) called a "solidarity of sentiment and understanding." Their homes, background, music, and way of life all proved unifying factors in the development of a Metis nation. Prior to the settling of the Red River colony by the English under Selkirk, the Metis had no feelings of nationalism, nor need for it. They were thinly spread over a huge area, and there were no threats to their way of life by other people in the region. All that changed under the British. In 1869 the Canadian government purchased what had been Selkirk's land, but returned to the Hudon's Bay Company shortly after his death in 1820; led by the Metis Louis Riel the Younger, the Metis, along with their French and English neighbors, rebelled against the Canadian government who took their land and its natural resources. The result of this first Riel Rebellion, as it is known to history, was that Manitoba became the fifth province of Canada, and achieved a locally elected governor as well as representation in the Canadian Parliament. But with the Canadian government considering the Metis to be Indian, and therefore unable to own property outside of a Reserve (reservation), the Metis remained unhappy, and their neighbors soon felt the same way; many of the promises made by the Canadian government remained unfulfilled. In 1884, Louis Riel was convinced to return from his government-imposed exile in Montana and lead an armed resistance from Saskatchewan, the second Riel Rebellion, which lasted into 1885. It failed, and Riel was hanged following a trial in Regina, Saskatchewan. Riel's words, however, live on. In my own rusty translation from his French, he said, "It is true that our origins are humble and savage; but it is only right that we honor our mothers as well as our fathers...[gap about having both Indian and European blood]... because we have both the one and the other, the recognition [of our parentage] and love for it, we won't let them [referring to the Canadian government and/or Europeans in general] choose [what to call us]: We are Metis." And so they became the New Nation, the Metis.

Following the death of Louis Riel, though, the Metis followed three different paths. Some stayed with the Indians, the full-blood Cree, and identified with them. According to my informants on the reservation, the descendants of those Metis still live on Cree and Salteaux Reserves in Canada, and in Prince Albert. Others stayed on their farms and eventually assimilated, more or less, into the white/European culture. The third group tried to maintain the Metis lifestyle of fur trapping and buffalo hunting; it was a part of this group that settled on the Turtle Mountain Reservation, and became known as the Michif; others live as Metis on the Rocky Boy Reservation in Montana. Today's Metis, whether Canadian Metis or American Michif, retain their self-determined identity, no matter what others call them. Antoine Lussier, a member of the Metis Federation in Manitoba, wrote: " The feeling of the Metis that they are a distinct entity in Canada persists. It now takes the from of societies devoted to gathering the history of the [New or Metis] nation, to preserving its traditions, and to justifying the actions of the past in which they still glory" (1978: 37). It is clear to most Canadian historians that Manitoba owes its existence as a province largely to the actions of Louis Riel and the Metis. The Michif of Turtle Mountain still often name their baby boys Riel, honoring their history, and the museum in Belcourt, center of the Turtle Mountain Chippewa Reservation, mainly depicts the history of the Michif.

Notes: The majority of the material used for this article comes from my own original research on the Turtle Mountain Reservation, and can be found in more detail in my thesis, Michif: A Problem In Classification by Lori L. Orser, Kansas University, 1984. Other references used herein are: Rhodes, Richard, 1977: French Cree: A Case of Borrowing, in Actes du Huitieme Congres des Algonquinistes; Ottawa: Carleton University; Reinecke, John E. et al, 1975: A Bibliography of Pidgin and Creole Languages. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press; DeCamp, David, 1971, The Study of Pidgin and Creole Languages, in Hymes, Dell (ed) Pidginization and Creolization of Languages. London: Cambridge University Press; Todd, Loreto, 1974 Pidgins and Creoles. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul; Whinnom, Keith, 1971, Linguistic Hybridization and the 'Special Case' of Pidgins and Creoles, in Hymes, 1971; Welmers, William E., 1973, African Language Structures, Berkeley: University of California Press; Morton, Arthur S., 1938, History of Prairie Settlement. Vol. 2 in Canadian Frontiers of Settlement, ed. by W.A. MacKintosh and W.L.G. Joerg; Toronto: The Macmillan Co., Ltd; Stanley, George F. G., 1978, Confederation 1870: A Metis Achievement, in Lussier and Sealey, 1978, The Other Natives: The--Les--Metis, Winnipeg: Manitoba Metis Federation Press; Lussier, Antoine S., 1978, The Metis, In Lussier and Sealey.