Question: Maria Campbell speaks four languages, including what language of the Métis people of Canada and the United States, who are the descendants of First Nations women?

Maria Campbell (born April 26, 1940 near Park Valley, SK) is a Métis author, playwright, broadcaster, filmmaker, and Elder.  Campbell is a fluent speaker of four languages: Cree, Michif, Saulteaux, and English. <SEP> Métis in Alberta are Métis people, descendants of mixed First Nations/native Indian and White/European families, who live in the Canadian province of Alberta.  The Métis are considered an aboriginal group under Canada's constitution but are in some respects separate from the First Nations (though they live in the same regions and have cultural similarities), and have different legal rights.  In Alberta, unlike in the rest of Canada, Métis people have negotiated certain lands to be reserved for them, known as Métis Settlements (Metis Betterment Act 1938).  These Metis Settlements Federated in 1975 and are governed by a distinct and unquie Metis Government known as the Metis Settlements General Council (MSGC).  The Metis Settlements General Council is the legislator of the Federation of Metis Settlements.  MSGC is the second largest land owner in the Province of Alberta. <SEP> Section 35 of the Constitution Act, 1982 recognizes three Aboriginal peoples of Canada: the First Nations, Inuit and Métis.  However, in the absence of a clear definition of the term Métis, certain descendants of the Métis of the Red River Colony, in what is now Manitoba, confuse the concepts of people and nation and assume that this recognition applies to them alone.  But in fact, the term métis was used far earlier, in New France, to refer to all descendants of mixed marriages between men of European descent and First Nations women.  In modern times, the Manitoba Metis Federation has turned this generic term into an ethnonym and claimed exclusive rights to its use.  The Métis National Council – the organization that represents the Métis Nation, defined as Manitoba, Saskatchewan, Alberta, and parts of Ontario, British Columbia, the Northwest Territories and the Northern United States – has done the same and still refuses to recognize the existence of other Métis, despite the recommendations in the report of the Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples and the Powley and Daniels decisions of the Supreme Court of Canada. <SEP> Michif (also Mitchif, Mechif, Michif-Cree, Métif, Métchif, French Cree) is the language of the Métis people of Canada and the United States, who are the descendants of First Nations women (mainly Cree, Nakota and Ojibwe) and fur trade workers of European ancestry (mainly French and Scottish Canadians).  Currently, Michif is spoken in scattered Métis communities in the provinces of Saskatchewan and Manitoba in Canada and in North Dakota in the U.S., with about 50 speakers in Alberta, all over age 60.  There are some 230 speakers of Michif in the United States (down from 390 at the 1990 census ), most of whom live in North Dakota, particularly in the Turtle Mountain Indian Reservation.  There are around 300 Michif speakers in the Northwest Territories, northern Canada.  Michif emerged in the early 19th century as a mixed language (not to be confused with a creole), and adopted a consistent character between about 1820 and 1840.