Michael Parks is the Michif Language Manager for Métis Nation of Alberta. (paNOW Staff/Nick Nielsen)

By Nick Nielsen

protecting language and history

Preserving the Métis language of Michif at Back to Batoche Days

Jul 19, 2025 | 8:00 AM

Michif is the language spoken by the Métis, but it’s one that is considered to be dying. That’s why if you go to Back to Batoche days and visit one of the pavilions, you’ll meet up with Michael Parks.

Parks is the Michif Language Manager for the Métis Nation of Alberta, now known at the Otipemisiwak Métis Government, and he is running one of the pavilions at Back to Batoche, where he is using card games and other games like Jenga to help teach the public about the Michif language.

“With the language games and activities, it’s just a way to entice families and children to just engage with us. We have a beading station, a kind of crafting station, and it’s just these different ways to introduce language to somebody that’s different than a language class. Have some fun, we’re kind of doing some things and, ‘oh by the way, you just learned how to say dog’ or something.”

It’s estimated that there are fewer than 2,000 Michif speakers in the country, and fewer than 1,000 who speak it fluently, and that population is growing older and older.

Because verbal storytelling is so important to most indigenous communities, the preservation of the Michif language doesn’t just mean preserving a certain way of speaking, but it also means preserving the history of the Métis people.

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“Language is definitely part of the cultural identity. The argument being, if you take people from France or Germany, are they still French or German if they don’t speak the language, right? What makes them different? What makes them unique? There’s obviously more to it than just a language, but a language is so intertwined with everything that you do within that culture. Right now, we can speak to our elders who can teach us the language, how they were taught speaking it from when they were babies, but with that comes all the cultural knowledge as well. So yeah, it is about preserving that and passing it on to the future generations.”

Part of what makes the Michif language so difficult to preserve is that it technically isn’t a language, but a group of three languages. As the Métis culture comes from the mixing of the Cree culture and French Canadian traders, all three forms of Michif use a mixture of French and Cree, with some additional words from English and other Indigenous languages such as Ojibwe and Assiniboine.

Northern Michif uses mostly Cree language with some French mixed in, French Michif uses French words with some Cree mixed in, and then Southern Michif, which is the language most people are referring to when they use the word Michif in the first place, is a balance between the two. Because there is such a difference between the three versions of the language, Parks said that even fluent Michif speakers may have a hard time understanding each other.

“These folks from B.C. are speaking a dialect of English compared to people who are speaking English in Fort St. John. There’s definitely some differences in the words that they use, but they can understand each other. Whereas the three different Michif languages, there is dialectical differences within each language, and there is some like language compromise or collaboration there where they will change the way they speak so that they could understand each other, but if you only knew how to speak Michif French, you would not understand somebody who speaking Northern Michif Cree because that language is so Cree heavy compared to Michif French, which is super French heavy. All three languages do have French influence in them, almost like a sliding bar, if you will.”

Along with the language games at his pavilion, Parks was also handing out pamphlets and other language resources to help get people who have never spoken Michif learning about the language. Even if you aren’t Metis, Parks encourages everyone to stop by their pavilion or reach out after Back to Batoche to learn more.

“The language revitalization industry for many people is growing every day. There is a lot of cross collaboration nationally, and we’re all working together to try and get this out to people, get more people speaking, so we’re just looking for even people who might be scared of learning the language, people who are nervous, just come check it out, get involved. We try to make it as accessible as we can.”

At the end of his interview, when asked what Michif phrase Parks likes to teach people first, he jokingly responded, saying something that sounded like ‘Ah-wash’, which means ‘go away’.

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nick.nielsen@pattisonmedia.com