For the identification of a specifically Métis literature

12 Anthologies and studies published on Aboriginal or Native writing and storytelling in Canada or in Quebec generally suggest that First Nations and Métis writings form one and the same literature.12 While such groupings do not prevent the mention that a particular writer is Métis, neither do they address the question of a distinct cultural production. This state of affairs is also related to the fact that the majority of such volumes are written from an English-language perspective, with the consequence that the historical connections between Métis of French ancestry and Franco-Canadians tend to be overlooked. The continued "neglect" of this reality is undoubtedly a reflection of the shift in relations between the two groups. However, questions of identity and literary continuity are difficult to establish when part of the scenario is disregarded. The identity issues are self-explanatory, but I want to underscore the fact that by failing to situate French-heritage Métis texts in relation to a particular tradition, by reinforcing the impression that we have a scattering of texts written by a few Métis writers, we diminish the critical, counter-discursive power they possess as expressions of a distinct historical and cultural space. Furthermore, the non-identification of a specifically Michif corpus may seem to contribute to the solidarity and homogeneous character of a "generic," pan-Aboriginal literature, but a more substantive concern is the preservation of the concept of cultural difference in the critical articulation of Aboriginal literatures. The differentiation of a French-heritage Métis literature contributes to the recognition that Aboriginal literature is a complex, rich, and diverse field whose texts cannot be lumped together and considered as simply Canada’s "other" literature. And finally, there is the concern of approaching Aboriginal literature following traditional literary practices in Canada, which often consist of limiting francophone issues to Quebec — the Rest of Canada being purportedly English speaking and writing, francophones and their descendants living and writing outside of Quebec do so in a sociocultural, geographical, and linguistic void.13 If this tendency is extended to Aboriginal literature, it may be considered as perpetuating, on some level, the circumstances that led to their being referred to as "Canada’s Forgotten People."

Historically speaking …

13 During the nineteenth century, the Franco-Métis of Western Canada spoke French, Michif, several First Nations languages, and, in many cases, English. Those who wrote notes, letters, petitions, or memoirs, or those whose spoken texts were transcribed by someone else, prove generally to have left us with texts produced in standardized French. (Generally, I say, since my research data includes documents written in phonetic French.) The most well-known names belonging to this group are Louis Riel, Gabriel Dumont, and perhaps Louis Schmidt, who wrote petitions and letters on behalf of members of the Métis community. Other texts, such as the memoirs that Louis Schmidt wrote and published, the memoirs of Louis Goulet, the voyageur, which were transformed into a manuscript and published by Guillaume Charette, and stories and anecdotes collected and published by Henri Létourneau, conserve a number of traits specific to orally "performed" or communicated texts, in that they convey the Franco-Métis world perception thematically as well as linguistically, through the inclusion of various lexical elements in Michif as well as in a First Nations language. In 2000, we saw the publication in French and Michif of a series of chronicles dictated by Auguste Vermette, one of Louis Riel’s nephews. Otherwise, Métis of French ancestry writing today tend to use the English language. My choice of the word "use" is deliberate, and intends to echo the opinion of Gloria Bird who, in the introduction of the collective volume Reinventing the Enemy’s Language, opines that English is not the "new native language in spite of its predominant use as a vehicle for native literary production." From this perspective, literature by Franco-Métis and their descendants is an aboriginal literature historically produced most often in "standardized" French, now most often in "standardized" English, but that seeks to make a breach in English Canada’s "official" language, by incorporating shrapnel consisting of different types of references to the Métis ancestral language, Michif.

Speaking in a present tense of the past …

14 Earlier on, I mentioned that for linguists, Michif is a unique mixed language, whereas for the Métis, the term can be applied to their French, or to a diversely mixed language made up of elements from French, English, Cree, Ojibwa and/or Salteaux (Algonquin). It follows, therefore, that texts that integrate the Métis ancestral language share characteristics with First Nations literatures written in English, with texts written in English by "Country-Born" Métis and their descendants — that is to say, those of Scottish, English, or Irish ancestry — as well as with texts written in French by Native and Métis living in Quebec, but they are different from all of them. A multifarious and almost exclusively oral language, and therefore highly problematic when it comes to its written transcription, Michif is non-normative, anti-institutional, perhaps anti-State, interrelational and re-lativizing. In other words, its textualization is simultaneously an expression of belonging and kinship, of identity and culture, a source of literary innovation and experimentation, and a weapon of resistance against reifying tendencies. From this perspective, texts that remember fragments of Franco-Métis language and culture may be said to challenge both non-Aboriginal and other-Aboriginal perceptions of language use and ways of knowing and describing the world, and all this, while demonstrating that it is community-based and richly con-textualized.

15 Now, French-heritage Métis over forthy-five years of age, tend to have lost their First Nations language — such is the legacy of residential schools. As Emma LaRocque mentioned to me six years ago in a telephone message, "somewhere along the way [the Métis] have lost [their] French." As I have observed while attending the last three of four annual conferences held on the development of the Michif language, however, many find it relatively easy to recognize and master words that come from Canada’s other official language, French, and need only to learn the Métis pronunciation. As demonstrated at these conferences, but also and even more so in the literary field, for Métis of French ancestry, identity aesthetics revolve around a certain reclaiming of heritage and roots through the ancestral language. "Certain," it must be emphasized, because forgotten or ignored echoes of this oral culture have indeed recently begun to reappear, but reinvented, revitalized and life-giving, accompanied by the admission, uttered in the same breath, that the familiar yet foreign sounds are being, in the words of one of Marilyn Dumont’s poems, "lamented, like a phantom limb." In her poem, "Our tongue belonging," it is the "nerve of Cree [that] remains in the mouths that have tasted a foreign alphabet too long," but in the poem "les animaux," it is the Mitchif spoken by her uncle Gabriel that appears in the text, in response to the recognition expressed in "Our tongue belonging" that "frequently, we sound too little of ourselves." For many contemporary French-heritage Métis writers, the links to an other-language-speaking ancestry that define and give shape to their writing are intangible, perhaps most alive when they become fiction. Indeed, in its diverse fictionalized forms, the ancestral language contributes to the fashioning of a textual space within which the subject can negotiate a continual, self-defined trajectory.

16 Thus it is in Lee Maracle’s Sundogs, for example, that Marianne, the first-person narrator, tells her "Momma" that she will decide on her positioning vis-à-vis each of her parents’ ancestral languages while traversing the country during the Okanagan Peace Run. Tellingly, it is at Manitoba’s "Pays Plat," appropriated as "Paise Platte," that she "naturally" comes into contact with, and continues the steps of, someone "long dead … probably some young voyageur from Montreal, a half French, half Native fur bearer," as she says at first. Two sentences further along, she "decides," emphasizing her agency, that it is "some gorgeous young man" who died for love, and in the course of imagining his story, she invents his reinvention of her. The two imaginations fuse, resulting in Marianne’s discovery of a self-acknowledging "internal self" inhabited by a great communal love.

17 Writing an almost exclusively oral language, the nineteenth-century corpus generally incorporates Michif rather soberly, as though concerned with imparting objective information, and as if to accept the subject position assigned by the powers that be. Louis Schmidt (1844-1935) presents a typical case.

18 Having studied in Quebec with Riel, Schmidt worked at dozens of different jobs and was a man of letters, literally and figuratively. He rewrote father Albert Lacombe’s Cree dictionary, composed letters, petitions, and proclamations on behalf of Riel’s provisory government and on behalf of Métis with grievances related to land surveys or homesteads, kept a diary, and in 1911 and 1912, at the age of sixty-seven, he was asked by the Duck Lake newspaper, Le Patriote de l’Ouest, to write his memoirs. Schmidt is considered to have integrated well into French-Canadian society, having not only obtained land with his "scrip," but also collaborated closely with the clergy, notably in the capacity of an assistant colonizing agent. For all that, his representations of the people of the homeland’s cultural practices form a valorized trope that also serves the role of critiquing the dominant Anglo-Saxon culture.

19 Schmidt’s polyphonic text juxtaposes Michif, standardized French, Sioux, Salteaux, English, and Latin, and results in a subtly festive, transgressive textual openness. Almost all elements in a language other than standardized French are underscored. The effect of this treatment is to give the impression of a francophone territory where intercultural and -lingual relationships are the norm. The tendency to treat all "other" languages in the same way results in a text that is somewhat carnivalized in the Bakhtinian sense of shamelessly disregarding concepts of protocol, hierarchy, and other such orderly and ordering principles. One example concerns his use of a Latin expression to refer to a repugnantly ugly giant of a man from whose murderous intentions he is saved by the intervention of the chief of the Sioux camp he is visiting. The next day, he writes, there is no sign of his "monstrum Horrendum" (4). Elsewhere in his memoirs, Schmidt engages in a sort of linguistic archaeological dig. It turns out that he cannot mention an English place name without revealing its original name in Michif or one of the First Nations languages. Certainly, these remarks have historical value, but above all, they pay tribute to the "people of the homeland" and reveal the rapport between the Franco-Métis and other peoples of the land.

20 When speaking of a site that has a Michif and a First Nations name, Schmidt gives equal status to both, as when he writes, "We arrived at la Rivière Rhum or Anoka, the railway station located thirty miles from St Paul" (4).14 But when referring to a site whose new name speaks to the erasure of the Métis’s former majority status, an adversarial tone creeps into the narration. At the very beginning of his text, for example, Schmidt declares that instead of writing "Lake Athabasca," a name only derived from the Cree word "Athepescow," he will use the name "Rabasca." The reasons given for his choice are triple: the word is "more euphonious, therefore, simpler, and it is how the people of the homeland named it" (3).15 Another passage slyly involves a more elaborate gloss: since it involves the site of a battle where the Métis were victorious, Schmidt takes his time explaining how the English name of la Grenouillère came to be. Other passages express disdain for the English more explicitly by mocking a particular member of that group (4),16 but Schmidt does not ever go as far as his contemporary, Louis Goulet (1859-1936).

21 In Goulet’s as-told-to memoirs, dictated in all likelihood in the 1920s and 1930s to a fellow Franco-Métis, Guillaume Charette (1884-1952), the voyageur recounts the time a First Nations warrior forces him to join in an attack. He comments that although he found it regrettable to have to kill people, he had to do it. "Fortunately, he exclaims, it was just some … Anglais!" (169). As for attempting to convey the Métis voice speaking his mother tongue, the text rarely does so. While recounting a wendigo experience (a delirious old woman claims to be on the point of becoming a "cannibal") Goulet reiterates his warning to the man supposed to kill the old woman: "Wha! Wha! boy, fais pas ça, si tu la tues, la vieille, tu vas être pendu comme un crapaud!" (164). ("Hold it, boy, don’ do it, if you kill the old woman, you’ll be hung like a toad!" Also, once during Riel’s trial, in reaction to a threat uttered in anger when Goulet refuses to perjure himself, the latter explodes in an angry, irreverent outburst, expressed in standardized Canadian French and directed toward the prosecution’s lawyer. It is the disapproving reaction of a friend that is textualized entirely in Michif: "Speaking with a Métis accent, Charles Nolin told me: Wah! Wah! Boy, té devras pas parler dé mame! " (181). That the English translation of the memoirs leaves untranslated the passage, which could be likened to something like "Hey, hey! Boy, ya shoun’t talk like dat" (153), conveys the importance and distinctiveness of this cultural fragment, "a clear signifier … of an Other language." (Ashcroft et al. 63.)

22 In 1973, McClelland & Stewart published Maria Campbell’s Half-breed. Elements of the author’s ancestral Métis French are largely expunged from the edited version, but the language is referred to thematically when Campbell discusses her linguistic background. Furthermore, the publication conserves two words in Michif: "shnet" (25), a word used to refer to the "booze" made by Old Cadieux, who spoke more French than English or Cree; and the word for "little," petit — pronounced "pitchee" —, which, in names, is shortened to "ti" — pronounced [chee], which Campbell writes as "Chi." The word "Michif" does not appear, but in its place, the narrator states that a person is speaking "French and Cree, … in the same mixture of languages" (56), or "in French, Cree and English." A number of Cree words appear, accompanied by an explanatory note in standardized English,17 while one passage integrates a Cree expression without an explanation.18 One exceptional passage lets us "hear" the English spoken by a Franco-Métis. When asked what he is doing in a tree, Chi-George answers: "Hi was jist lookin’ ’round to see hif hi could spot a hindian. Don’t trust dem hindians!" (26).

23 Twenty-two years after the publication of Halfbreed, Theytus Books published Maria Campbell’s Stories of the Road Allowance People, in which the "village English" — such is the expression used in the preface — of the sort spoken by Chi-George, has the starring role. The aesthetic value the author attributes to a phonetically written language clearly marking the accent, rhythm, grammar, and syntax of a Michif speaker, that is to say, one for whom English is not the mother tongue, is conveyed explicitly by the versified form of the text. The beginning of a story entitled "Rou Garous,"19 for example, reads thus:You ever heered about dah Rou Garous?
Never!
Me I taught everybody he knowed about dem.
Well dere humans you know
Jus like you an me
But someting he happen to dem an dey turn to dogs in dah night.
Dats right!
Some of dem dey even turn into wolfs.
Dats shore funny isn it
How tings like dat dey can happen on dis eart. (28)

The pronunciation of "th" as "d," and the emphasis of certain words expressed by the repetition of a substantive by its corresponding pronoun or of a personal pronoun by its tonic form ("Me I," "someting he," or "tings like dat dey"), common to Cree and French, but foreign to English, the ungrammatical past tense forms of various verbs ("heered" for heard, "knowed" for knew), and the phonetic spelling of words pronounced "à la mitchif " ("taught" for thought, "shore" for sure), are all means of "perverting" the Queen’s English, while, at the same time, subverting the concept of "literature" and the practice of its "reading" as an art to be appreciated silently, through the creation of an undeniably musical, sonorous poetry that demands to be read aloud.

24 Between 1981 and 1985, Auguste Vermette, Riel’s nephew, dictated his memoirs to a Franco-Manitoban. In his late eighties at the time, he tells his version of events without quarter. In the following passage, he recounts the memory of the racism suffered while attending school with French Canadians. Interestingly, the unhappy memory is no sooner recalled than the narrator transforms it by conflating the period of his boyhood with a later period, when Louis Riel’s memory had been "rehabilitated":Why were the Michif ashamed of saying they were Michif? They were always ridiculing us! I was at school, me and the others, and the French Canadians, eh, it was like we were nothing, because we were Michif. They talked about us with disdain. It was like we were manure! "Bannock Gobblers!" We revenged ourselves, though: we called those little Canucks, "Canshmucks."

There was SO much they didn’t realize, the important role we played in history. Not one bit! Only afterwards. Huh! Afterwards, when they understood what really happened to Riel. Then, eh, my goodness! They were all Michif. Then, it was okay! Some of those guys were Riel’s descendants!
Damn it all!
THAT’s what made Riel mad! All of a sudden, they all wanted to be Michif!20

25 Less explicit, but perhaps all the more corrosive, are writer Sharron Proulx-Turner’s references to Michif. Thematic for the most part, they constitute vehement critiques of what she calls the "colonizer’s language" or a "foreign language," and although she differentiates between her language and culture and "Indian people’s cultures," she recognizes the traits shared by the two communities. To inscribe her Michif identity, she refers frequently to its French composite, as in the following passage from what the auntys say, in which she transforms racist clichés into sensual, yet militant self- and community-affirming declarations. The text having referred to Riel’s prophecy that "it will be the artists who give [his people] back their spirit" (32), the narrator speaks of the writer’s using words to create "dialogues of doo doo" (41) and of "writing out the silence writing out the pain" (84): "yes she’s brilliant for a young savage / her favourite food is french fries and there’s something about her / writing / lazy and arrogant / like a rich french dessert" (58).

26 Other aggressive identity practices include using the "michif cradle tongue" (15) without glossing it in English. Examples are found in a 1994 footnote21 that invents the voice of her great-great-grandmother calling her "ma petite," words repeated without italics in a text published in 1999 (18-19), and when a voice in what the auntys say gives the recipe for "les boulettes" (63; meatballs), or refers playfully to the "rougarou and how do you do" (109), but without glossing the Michif French.

27 The tendency for planting textual landmines in the form of un-glossed Michif words likely to be recognized only by the initiated or someone with knowledge of French is yet more evident in the writing of Joe Welsh, whose 2003 publication of stories and voices, entitled Jackrabbit Street, is prefaced by a page where the author expresses his "love, respect, and gratitude" to different community members. About Maria Campbell, he writes that she "didn’t just open the door for us — she kicked the damn thing down." The "us" certainly includes all Aboriginal writers of Canada, but it refers foremost to Métis writers of French heritage.

28 The voices heard in Jackrabbit Street appropriate standardized English by liberating it from syntactical, grammatical, and phonetic rules and by having it share the page with other languages. They remind the reader of Maria Campbell’s Stories of the Road Allowance People, but are different in that they integrate vocabulary in Michif that comes from the French language. Be they endearments or familiar, popular, or vulgar words and expressions, all are underscored in italics. Their variety contributes to the portrayal of Franco-Métis not as stereotypes, but as individual human beings who get angry, love, suffer, and laugh. They say things like "Maudit Culvert !" (Maudit calvaire, in standardized French Canadian; there is not really an equivalent in English, but "Godammit to Hell" conveys the gist of its meaning); "Ah Diable !" (10; "Good gracious"); "Sacrament my boy" (13; "Christ" or "Jeeze"); and "Mange le merde. Nono!" (32; "Eat shit. Stupid!" — in standardized French, "merde" is feminine); but also "Bonne nuit, ma joie. I love you;" (23; "Good night, dear heart"); and "ma vieille chouette" (25; "my old darling"). Furthermore, whereas the only French Canadians mentioned in Stories of the Road Allowance People are a thief and the priest, Jackrabbit Street’s storytellers reveal the French-Canadian influence on the ways they see and inhabit the world. Father Beaulieu is the object of mercilessly hilarious scatological anecdotes, whereas "Half Breed Breakfast," for example, concludes with the following assertion: "Eat that ever day boy, you gonna grow up an’ be big strong hockey player. Just like Maurice Richard" (34).

29 Throughout the volume, irreverent humour shares space with examples of brutal demeaning behaviour imposed by authority figures outside the community as well as with tales of "indecent," scatological anecdotes, in which community members lock horns, but in a friendly adversarial mode. Most often, the humour is ironic, and whether it is mockingly scornful of others or self-deprecating, it points always to the circumstances characterizing existence at the bottom of the socio-economic ladder.

30 "The Making of a Half Breed Bandit" tells the story of Rocky Poisson who, in need of money in order to entertain his new girlfriend, Rose Adelle Deuxchapeau, during the Depression, decides to become a train robber. Entirely unfamiliar with the ins and outs of the "profession," he turns to the narrator for guidance. Each time Rocky is informed of the need for a new item, he must steal it. His first acquisition, a horse, elicits the following reaction: Ah Diable, I start to laugh an’ I tell him, "Hollasmokes Poisson, hownahell you going to rob a train with that old horse? I bet you me I can run faster than him. Besides, you got no gun. You got no bridle. No lines. No saddle. Hownahell you going to hold on to your horse if you got to hold on to couple bags of money at the same time? You’re not going to scare nobody like that. A ban Christ, a ban Christ, the train guys they’s going to laugh at you.
So he go away an’ couple days later he come riding up again. This time he have a bridle a saddle an’ lines. Everthing. He even have a six-shooter, but the horse he still don’t look too good. (10)

31 After informing the narrator that he got "all the stuff" by robbing "a bunch of [drunk rodeo] cowboys," Rocky asks, "The train? What time it goes by?", and upon receiving the answer, rides away, taking leave of the narrator with an "Adios amigo" that seems to indicate that, in his mind, he has just been transformed into a Mexican bandit. The narrator continues his tale:Well boy. The train it come an’ it stop at the station an’ after a few minutes it pull out. An’ you won’t believe it. Hey hey maudit crapeau ! Before it get going too fast, that crazy bugger Poisson he’s chasing after it on that poor old horse … he have his six-shooter out an’ he start to shoot at the train. Pan! Pan! Pan! But a little gun like that it’s not going to hurt a train …. So all at once the train driver, he throw a lump of coal an’ it hit Poisson on the head an’ knock him off the horse.
Hey hey crapeau ! Talk about laugh. Everbody in town see this.… (10)The denouement confirms the impasse that is Rocky’s life, and, without even attempting to articulate a "moral" or lesson, informs us that not only have the protagonist’s plans for solvency failed, but also, the woman for whom he had undertaken to alter his fate, Adelle Deuxchapeau, leaves town with the cowboy who arrives in town, in search of the "saddle an’ bridle an’ gun" (11) "someone" had stolen from him: "It’s last time anybody from around here see her," states the laconic and single final sentence of the text.

32 This story is representative of the collection, in that its humour derives from circumstances rife with personal tragedies that characterize the fate of a hapless community. What becomes abundantly clear is that the ability to survive in the face of insurmountable obstacles is an important trait of the Métis culture/identity, and that their telling constitutes a celebration. In themselves, the narrated "events" are important for what they reveal of little-known Métis "experiences." What transforms them into celebratory pieces, however, is the language used to tell them. In light of literature’s tendency to remain a bastion of linguistic purity, the language used to convey the stories and voices of Welsh’s narrators, new to the Canada’s literary "wordscape," fly in the face of Canada’s official, canonical literatures: that is to say, those written in one of the nation’s two official languages. The "English" used in Jackrabbit Street is unquestionably "improper" and frequently vulgar, but it inscribes and validates the linguistic as well as socio-economic realities of a culture whose specificity is yet to be widely acknowledged. Moreover, its musicality lends it a surprisingly and undeniably poetic quality. Above all, it carries linguistic markers of the little-known and all-but-disappeared Michif language.

33 In the first category, let me cite various elisions (for example, an’ for "and," hownahell for "how in the hell"), double negatives (not going to scare nobody), ungrammatical verb forms (you got no…, he don’t look good, the train guys they’s going to laugh at you) and mispronunciations of certain words (Everthing, everbody). The second category of traits includes a syntactical repetition of a substantive by its pronoun in order to place emphasis on the first element, used in Cree and in French, but not in English (Poisson he, the train guys they’s) or of a personal pronoun by its tonic form (I bet you me I). The textual trait most foreign to canonical English Canadian expression is of course the integration of Michif French expressions, be they interjections or onomatopoeia, that, written without any distinguishing marks, not only "contaminate" a text that could otherwise be considered to be written in "low English," all the while rendering the text partially opaque for unilingual anglophone readers, but also, at times, "pervert" canonical French Canadian French. If, in French, for example, "well, Christ" is expressed with the words "ah ben, Christ [Crisse]," Welsh writes "A ban Christ," as though it were a question of "banning" Him. Also, while in French Canada, common euphemisms for "Christ" include "crime" and "crèche," the narrator of "The Making of a Half Breed Bandit" is fond of the word "crapeau" (meaning, literally, "toad," which, in standardized French is written "crapaud"), whence his interjection, "Hey hey (maudit) crapeau!" Finally, it must be noted that "Pan! Pan! Pan!" does not refer to kitchenware but is the equivalent, in standardized French as well as in Michif French, of the English-language onomatopoeia "Bang! Bang! Bang!"

34 The explosion of familiar or vulgar Michif French and mutilated English in the body of a text already liberally punctuated by blasphemous English slang is humorous, liberating. Above all, it ensures against the takeover of particular voices by a universalizing language. In this study, I have attempted to show that as oral forms of expression, Michif and Michif French may well be disappearing, despite efforts to conserve and resuscitate them, but they have become incontestably rich sources of an emergent creative expression of place and identity that validates a people and culture that have been all but forgotten. The reinvention of a language specific to some of Western Canada’s Métis of French ancestry, in the form of publishable, written words — and used to uncover fragments of individual knowledge and experiences that, if they were to be told in canonic Canadian English or French, could well have the effect of re-colonizing the Métis — has the potential to reinscribe a space that, to the Métis, feels like a homeland. As the interest in Métis culture(s) and cultural production continues to grow, thereby fostering increased confidence in their artists, it must be hoped that other inventions of languages infused with specifically Métis ways of loving words appear in print, thus giving new life to some of the many languages that seem to have disappeared, but that, remembered, reinvented, and revitalized in fiction, will noisily reveal heretofore hidden and, for non-Métis, unsuspected, realities, sounds, and poetry. This could only confirm what we already know, namely that the memories, dreams, and traumas that contribute to defining the Canadian land- and wordscape are indeed many and diverse.