Words to Action: Michif Transformative Stories for the Land

• In Event: Indigenous Stories of Place/Land/Water: Relations in Education

Abstract

Elders’ stories provide understanding of foundational concepts of Indigenous knowledge and land pedagogies, including experiential, transformative, and cultural learning drawing from the teachings of Indigenous peoples. Indigenous languages facilitate expression and cataloguing of knowledge of ecosystems, environmental features, animals, and plants, interrelationships, and cultural and living practices in the stories about life on and with the land. (Westman & Schreyer, 2014; Schiff & Moore, 2006). Various stories from Elders (not sacred teachings) gathered in a storytelling methodology are shared to highlight opportunities for education prevalent in the Indigenous knowledge systems within which Elders are sharing in Michif language.
Michif is a severely-threatened Indigenous language developed by the Métis, a recognized Indigenous people of Canada, that draws on respectful relationships in historic Indigenous language of Cree/Nehiyawak and French which is sometimes also referred to as Cree language by its speakers (Anenakew, 1997; Bakker,1997; 2004; Crawford, 1985). There are “interrelationships between language, cognition, memory, survival, and world view” within “systems of naming and categorizing …within Indigenous languages” that represent ancient knowledge gathered through many years of research into relationship to lands that are encoded in language (Turner, Burton, & Van Eijk, 2013).
Ten Métis Elders from various communities in northern Alberta and Saskatchewan, Canada shared stories in Michif language during a 2 week period to discuss Michif knowledge through a storytelling methodology drawing on ceremonial practices. Elders were gathered in an Indigenous residential centre on the edge of a lake and were video and audio recorded telling stories to one another. Research questions were provided to Elders to help focus their discussions. Over the next 3 years all Michif language sequences were translated by Elders and language speakers.

The Elders’ stories show an Indigenous approach that is grounded in their localized, Indigenous knowledge that can be utilized, shared and engaged in educational contexts. Their stories shared in this presentation in Michif recordings (with English subtitles) provide understandings of meaning of Michif/Nehiyaw language and its adaptability for the environments in which the language was developed and continues to live. They further explain ways that language is negotiated in the lives of Metis/Cree who also speak traditional Cree and the complexity of defining place in multiple languages. Elders stories demonstrate and document the importance of interconnectedness of Cree and Michif and learning within interrelationships, recognizing sacred teachings and accumulated knowledge in cultural teachings, and a relational approach where students and educators learn from Elders and other knowledge-keepers.

The benefits of learning from Elders’ stories is these guides in our communities encourage the younger generations and educators to seek understandings and continue the research into understandings of the land and continue the research into the relationships to land and
educational practices that can be incorporated into mainstream education. When we return to our languages, our cultural understandings, our connections to our ancestors and ancestral knowledge, our connections to the land, and our connections to our inner selves, spirit and soul, begins to strengthen. This is why our connections to language strengthen who we are.

Author

• Judy M. Iseke, University of Alberta