small note on Michif & Leonard Peltier

[Mike Cleven]

At 11:50 AM 12/7/99 -0800, Nadja Adolf wrote:
>My friend Mary is metis, speaks "French", claims people
>from France insist she's speaking Haitian, and sees her
>ancestry as being distinct from the surrounding Ojibwa
>and the French whites.
>
>Her definition of what a "Metis" is, in UP Michigan, is
>that "Chippewa speak Chippewa, and are Catholic",
>but "Metis speak French and are Protestant."
>
>I don't know how accurate an anthropologist would consider
>this, but Mary and her Mom and relations have been saying this
>to me for years.

Yikes!  I knew that things were a bit different with American Metis, but
this is pretty wildly different; Canadian Metis (as in traditional Metis,
not the "new" inclusory definition of "anyone with native ancestry but no
native status) are overwhelmingly Catholic; Louis Riel being the most
famous example (and something of a Catholic mystic at that).  Must be a
question of who was running the settlement/mission schools in each
community....although certainly the Scots background of a lot of Canadian
Metis suggests that some of them may have inherited their Protestantism
there, if they are, that is.

As for the first paragraph and its comment about the sound of Metis French,
it is true that it probably sounds a lot like Haitian; more like
Acadian/Cajun, actually.  Nearly all New World French is more similar to
French of the ancien regime than to modern continental French; Quebecois
has become more and more like French-French (as we call it in Canada) in
the past few decades, with the result that Metis, Manitobaine, Saskais,
Acadien and various local dialects of Ontarien and Quebecois "country
French" can be near-unintelligible in Montreal or Quebec City, where
educational and clerical influences have been very strong (as have contacts
with France).  Metis French was founded in the very earliest years of
French colonization in North America, of course, and was firmly "in place"
by the time of the War of the Conquest (French and Indian War/Seven Years
War) and the fall of New France to the English.........

As I mentioned in earlier posts and on my Jargon website, people studying
the Jargon and its history would do well to remember that the French
component of the Jargon doesn't come from French-French, or even Quebecois,
but from the "older" prononciations and lexical peculiarities of the
voyageurs - the Metis.  "Pasiooks" properly means _them_ (cloth dealers),
not French-from-France; I know that "Pasiooks Illahee" normally is
translated as "France", but properly it should be "French Canada", or maybe
"the country of the French-speaking Metis"......

Mike