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PHOTO CREDIT Marie Healy Photo Cap Angelique Merasty Levac (third from left) with family and friends at BC Achievement Award banquet Jan 27, 2009 |
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Photo Credit 2 Malcolm McColl: Angelique at work in her store, but with time for Granddaughter and son. |
When I called Angelique Merasty Levac to interview for this story after the award ceremony in Vancouver she was feeling a bit under the weather perhaps from a lot of excitement. "I made myself some Indian medicine. It's a tea made from muskrat roots, pepperment leaves, and a green leaf from the muskeg. You drink this stuff and you sleep all night. I learned that from my Grandmother."
Angelique won the Individual Achievement Award for her 15 year operation of Angelique's Native Arts in Prince George, B.C.. She opened the store after migrating from northern Manitoba and Saskatchewan where she learned the art of birch bark biting in the tradition of northern Woodland Cree women.
In 1994, Angelique opened a store downtown to sell her own art (she is one of but a very few who practice birch bark biting anymore) and the work of other Native artisans. Most recently Angelique has sold a book entitled Kisemanitow Peyohtena Iskwahtem -- God Opens Doors, to a well-established publisher that she wrote about growing up in the Manitoba wilderness speaking only Cree until the age of 15. The publisher has committed to printing it for Canada and the USA in Spring 2009
Angelique told the audience that birch bark biting changed her life and she credits her faith in God for the entire experience. She said so in Cree to begin her speech at the B.C. Achievement Foundation Award ceremony, Jan. 27, 2009, at the Pan-Pacific Hotel.
"I flew up there and they paid all my expenses. Me and (my sister) Marie went, she was my helper and we flew in there and they booked us at the Pan-Pacific Hotel. It was the most beautiful place I ever stayed. I felt like a princess," she laughs.
The event was "really stressful for awhile until I did my speech. They said I had two minutes to deliver my speech. I really wanted to reach these people. It's not all my doing." In the end she credits the Creator, "I had a standing ovation. They clapped for one minute. I turned around to look at the Premier's helper and he said, 'Turn around,' and that's when I felt like a person from a trap-line, But you could hear a pin-drop while I told my story."
"I was born at Midnight Lake, Manitoba," she told them. "It is bush and nobody lives there," in the far northern reaches of central Canada. Angelique's story resonates because she holds close to her memories of this place spent with her grandparents. It was in the decades of the 1950s and 1960s.
It was the old way of connecting with the land which meant Angie's grandpa always found it necessary to break camp and find a different place every few weeks, for he was a trapper, hunter, and fisherman.
"I used to help my grandmother gather branches she used to make a floor inside the tent. There was nothing to play with when I was a child," a fact she once pointed out to her grandma. She told her she wanted a doll so her grandma made Angie a doll. "Do you know what my doll was? We had a flour sack and she tied up the bag into a rag doll, eyes made from the soot of the fire. That was my doll."
At 9 years of age Angie began to spend more time with her mother and less time with her grandparents when she came to be old enough to be more help to her mother, who was by now raising most of the twelve children she bore on the Lynn Lake railroad line in northern Manitoba.
At this point Angie remembers watching the birch bark biting when she went out with ladies on berry picking sojourns, "The blue berries found in burned out areas, and cranberries found in forested places."
It was the cranberry picking trips where she saw the women take respite to conduct little competitions. They would peel birch bark and make pieces of art with their teeth but Angie was too young to think much about it. It was a first impression of the way the ladies had social exchanges by causing exquisite artistic impressions by birch bark biting. She remembers a few of them got tossed away.
It was not until much later that she herself would adopt and help to preserve a fast disappearing cultural practice. It was her destiny to become a Cree cultural icon and reigning expert of a disappearing form of First Nation culture.
Over the past three decades Angie garnered a lot of attention for the artistic skill at birch bark biting. She still does, with beautiful straight teeth, with which she takes on the task of an ancient artistic craft (she flosses regularly). You can reach Angelique by email: creewomen@hotmail.com
