One of Canada’s most endangered dialects isn’t being reawakened in classrooms or on Duolingo. Instead, it’s finding new life inside the virtual world where kids already spend their time.
“We have to go to the platforms they are on and not only teach through play, but teach through building.”
Josh Nilson, Michif RP
Michif is one of the languages traditionally spoken by Métis people, alongside French and Cree. According to the 2021 Census, more than 624,000 people in Canada identify as Métis, yet only 1,485 people can hold a conversation in Michif. For decades, reclamation efforts leaned on pamphlets and books; vehicles young people associated with homework, or might see as distant, formal, and disconnected. To survive, a language has to live where youth already live: online.
Enter Josh Nilson, a Métis video game developer with decades of indie game experience. Nilson thought he had left gaming behind in October 2023 when he stepped away from East Side Games, the company he had co-founded 14 years earlier. But when he realized Michif risked disappearing without a digital presence, he came up with a bold idea: Michif RP. In June 2025, Nilson launched the virtual world inside Roblox, a free-to-play online gaming platform. Michif RP gives players the chance to step into a living community where they can discover fiddle music, earn badges tied to cultural traditions, or “try” traditional food, all while being immersed in the language.
Games as community
Roblox is an online platform that allows users to build their own games or play millions of games created by other users. Founded in 2004, it has grown to become more of a social network than a simple gaming platform, with more than 151 million daily active users as of last year. It has hosted major cultural moments, such as Gucci Garden, a limited-time experience showcasing digital fashion and brand storytelling, and Lil Nas X’s virtual concert, which drew 33 million attendees.
In many ways, Roblox works like a cultural operating system, with the power to shape how youth socialize, create, and signal identity. Players build worlds, trade items, and even earn real income. Roblox creators earned more than $1 billion USD in 2024. Like YouTube, its community-driven monetization keeps creators invested, while its algorithm rewards viral momentum. Even simple farming or fishing games have exploded after drawing a few thousand players into social play.
For Michif RP, Roblox offers a low-budget way to reach a rapidly growing audience: the game has more than 380 million monthly active users, many of whom are children and young adults.
Roblox’s tools allow for real-time collaboration, publishing, analytics, and monetization in a single platform, allowing creators to move from idea to live multiplayer world without building the technical infrastructure themselves. By contrast, the popular video game Minecraft encourages building a full multiplayer experience, which often feels like assembling your own workshop, requiring separate mods, servers, and external tools just to get online.
Roblox easily creates opportunities for direct cultural expression. Within Michif RP, players can buy clothing for their in-game avatar, like a capote (a traditional Métis coat), and learn about its significance at the point of purchase, with proceeds flowing to Indigenous charities.
Barriers to inclusion persist
Roblox’s discoverability does, however, have limits. Nilson said the word “Métis” doesn’t appear in Roblox’s search, even after flagging the issue to their senior engineer. So, the team renamed their world from Métis Life to ensure it would still be visible to users. When cultural terms are excluded, there’s a risk the algorithm won’t surface the content, which led Nilson to ask some hard questions: does this make the game essentially invisible? If the platform itself can’t recognize Indigenous identity, is it really the right place to build?
However, Roblox’s platform offers other benefits, despite some limitations. Studies show that language learners often quit early when they feel pressure or shame. “When I learn Italian, I don’t pressure myself,” Nilson says. But, he said, with Michif, there’s a cultural expectation to know your language. “If you don’t know it, you feel like a failure.”
Linguist Stephen Krashen has written that emotional states, like anxiety or confidence, can either block or allow language learning. As he said in a 1980s lecture, “If the student is on the defensive… [they] may understand the input, but it won’t penetrate. It won’t reach the parts of the brain that do language acquisition.”
Michif RP flips and gamifies that script by ensuring that making mistakes is part of the community experience, so everyone is learning together. Players learn through low-stakes interactions such as greeting friends or picking up the word for bread while another user bakes. These high-context micro-habits build fluency through confidence and repetition.
Nilson said he recognizes Roblox’s infrastructure sometimes overlooks Indigenous priorities. For now, he’s accepting that trade-off, with the knowledge that Roblox is a bridge, not the destination. True change requires Indigenous creators building tools themselves.
Empowering 1,000 new creators
To turn that vision into action, in the summer of 2025 Nilson launched Maskwa Games bootcamps with Métis communities, starting in Alberta, where Indigenous youth learn game development and coding skills that connect directly to Canada’s $5.4-billion gaming industry.
Nilson says that he thinks the newest generation of gamers will learn differently and will be more adaptable and intuitive than previous generations. “We have to go to the platforms they are on and not only teach through play, but teach through building.”
Nilson said his team’s mission is to bring 1,000 new Indigenous digital creators into the ecosystem in the next two years. “Think of our training as a first step into making games, maybe even tech. I think it opens your mind to what’s possible with open source and no-code development. We are giving them the overview, the support that they need to get started.”
Nilson has experienced that shift firsthand. He grew up with platforms like Xbox, Facebook, and Nintendo, where development worked more like factory lines with multiple sandboxes: you build a new version, package it, send it through certification, and ship it in large, slow batches.
Today’s young people are growing up with user-generated content platforms like Roblox, where that process is radically different. Roblox has just one sandbox, where players test and edit in real time with teammates. As Nilson explained, “You’re kind of building while you’re live.”
Nilson says there’s room for the Michif RP world to evolve and be replicated easily worldwide. Imagine Roblox worlds designed by Māori, Cree, Sami, or Hawaiian youth and communities. Museum kiosks could let visitors step into a digital powwow or gather around storytelling avatars.
Nilson puts it simply: “We want to ‘Robin Hood’ the model, give it away so others can build better versions.”
Feature image courtesy Michif RP.