KAHKIIHTWAAM EE-PEE-KIIWEEHTATAAHK.

Surveying the deserted Batoche National Historic Site in May before the season opening, one can imagine the Métis people in the spring of 1884 preparing their fields and garden plots by the same windswept prairie and glittering South Saskatchewan River. Over time, Métis in the north and elsewhere in the Red River area came up with other blendings of Cree and French, all of which they referred to as Michif. According to the 2016 Canadian census, Michif was the mother tongue of 725 people and the language spoken at home by 275 people, but those numbers include as many as four languages spoken by the Métis. "It seems that the most complex categories of each language are part of Michif instead of the most simple", writes Bakker in his groundbreaking 1997 book, A Language of Our Own: The Genesis of the Mixed Cree-French Language of the Canadian Métis, which focuses on Heritage Michif. [Extracted from the article]

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