"I was born at Midnight Lake, Manitoba," explained Angelique Merasty Levac, about the far northern reaches of central Canada. "It is bush and nobody lives there. Once in a while a few of my siblings or family members traps there." Angie holds close memories of a distant place spent with her grandparents in the decades of the 1950s and 1960s. It was a Cree people’s playground and belonged to no one else.
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| Angelique Merasty Levac |
"I lived beside a nice lake," and enjoyed the company of loons going 'co-co-op' in the morning hours. Angie recollects, "My grandparents tried to teach me how to trap when I was six years old." It was a tiny squirrel trap set under a bundle of roots at the base of a tree near the lakeside, not far from the family dwelling, a large canvas tent.
Her grandmother, she recalls, provided explicit instructions about the patience of trapping, leaving the site alone to permit the process to take its course. Little Angie waited till grandparents went to sleep and approached her fledgling trap line to see if she was enriched.
She stuck her six year old hand into the squirrel-sized cubby hole and trapped herself, snap. Ouch. So she hollered with an affinity for the squirrel that wasn't there and recalls a painful few minutes by inspecting her long, feminine fingers on both hands. It was the end of Angelique Merasty Levac's life as a trapper and a few families of bushy tailed squirrels have reason to chatter in gratitude.
Those years in the lakes district straddling the Manitoba-Saskatchewan border were similar to a nomadic way because Angie’s grandpa found it necessary to break camp and find a different place every few weeks. He was a trapper, "My grandpa never lived in one place," and packed the large tent and barrel stove to set off looking to camp at the right spot. It was a lean existence.
"I used to help my grandmother gather branches she used to make a floor inside the tent," and, "there was nothing to play with when I was a child. Do you know what my toy was?" She told her grandmother she wanted a doll. “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 nine years of age Angie began to spend more time with her mother and less time with her grandparents, because she would be more help to her mother raising 12 children on the Lynn Lake railroad line in northern Manitoba. She went out with ladies on berry picking sojourns, blue berries found in burned out areas, cranberries found in forested places.
It was the cranberry picking trips where she saw the women take a rest and 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 made social exchanges while causing artistic impressions by birch bark biting that she adopted as a fast disappearing cultural practice.
Angelique Merasty Levac has become a Cree cultural icon and reigning queen of a disappearing form of First Nation culture. Over the past three decades Angie has garnered a lot of attention for the artistic skill at birch bark biting. She has beautiful straight teeth with which to take on the task of an ancient artistic craft.
In an oddly important coincidence her teacher of the art was also named Angelique Merasty. The elder Angelique Merasty has passed away and almost miraculously passed the legacy to Angelique Merasty Levac under the most difficult conditions imaginable.
The reason the younger Angelique was found to return to the art form is partly owed to bingo, for the mentor Angelique Merasty was one day sitting waiting for a ride to bingo and was, miraculously, in the company of an anthropologist while she waited. To pass the time she reached over and peeled a piece of birch bark off a log and bit into it until the art was born. The taxi arrived and she cheerfully left it to the professor, who promptly sent it to an archivist and writer.
Soon an article appeared detailing the art and the artist, who had been interviewed and expressed a wish to pass the craft onto someone before it was forgotten. Angelique the student saw the magazine article when she was 24 years of age. It is important to realize where our Angie grew up. She did not speak English until she was about 12 to 15 years of age, and only spoke Cree. (This was prior to Bill C-31 and she had no access to school for her mother had been stripped of her status by her marriage to a Metis man.)
Our Angie did not read English until she taught herself by reading the Holy Bible. By the time she was 24 she was able to read and stood amazed to see her name described in a magazine at a store. She stared at the magazine story about Angelique Merasty, not herself, but her name, who was a practitioner of an ancient art form, a Cree culture artform, and this same Angelique Merasty described in the article how she, "would like to pass this Native art form onto another."
Our Angie had those recollections of the ladies in the berry patches taking a respite to bite into the birch bark and she decided thereabouts that the passing ought to be to herself.
She credits her worship of God, "The Lord put that in my heart. Since I did it, it opened doors that I never dreamed of," including a visit to Bill Cosby in Philadelphia, USA, with a guest appearance on his remake of the TV classic 'You Bet Your Life.' She was interviewed by Keith Morrison on CTV, and appeared on BCTV, APTN, the Knowledge Network, and in numerous print articles, including this one in the nationwide Native Journal. (For more information about Angelique’s art email her at angeliquesnativearts@yahoo.ca)
