Business and art continues with Angelique Merasty Levac

By Malcolm McColl

PRINCE GEORGE B.C. - The previous time we talked was in 2009, and I interviewed Angelique Merasty Levac after an award ceremony in Vancouver, she was feeling a bit under the weather, “I made myself some Indian medicine,” she said. “It’s a tea made from muskrat roots, peppermint leaves, and a green leaf from the muskeg. You drink this stuff and you sleep all night. I learned that from my Grandmother.”

Angelique was invited to Vancouver as a 2010 recipient of the Individual Achievement Award for her 15-year operation of Angelique’s Native Arts in Prince George, B.C. It's now 18 years and last year she moved her retail store to a new location in the city on Dominion Street and 3rd avenue, Prince George. I met her at the store this fall 2011, and it's bigger with more inventory and a great location downtown .

Angie migrated to B.C. from northern Manitoba where she learned the art of birch bark biting in the tradition of Northern woodland Cree women. She is one of the very few who practice birch bark biting anymore. In 1994, Angelique began selling her own art and the work of other Native artists at her downtown store in Northern B.C.'s hub city. This fall the biggest news came for Angie about a book she wrote entitled Kisemanitow Peyohtena Iskwahtem: God Opens Doors.

Indian Life Ministries is a well-established publisher Canadian and US publisher. An interesting part of Angie's life story is about growing up in the Manitoba wilderness speaking only Cree until the age of 15. The publisher committed to printing it in Canada and the USA in the coming year.

Angie is a fluent speaker of Cree. In fact, at the B.C. Achievement Foundation award ceremony held at the Pan-Pacific Hotel on January 27th, of 2010, Angelique began her speech in Cree, explaining to the audience that birch bark biting changed her life and she credits her faith in God for the entire experience.

“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. Angelique admitted that the event was “really stressful for a while 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 . . . You could hear a pin-drop while I told my story.”

Angelique was born at Midnight Lake, Manitoba in the far Northern reaches of central Canada. She says, “It is bush and nobody lives there.” Yet, Angelique’s story resonates because she holds close to her memories of this place where she lived with her grandparents during the 1950s and 1960s. They lived the ancient way with connection to the land. It was hunting, fishing, and trapping, which meant her grandpa found it necessary to break camp and find a different place every few weeks.

“There was nothing to play with when I was a child,” says Angie, a fact she once pointed out to her grandma. Angie said she wanted a doll, so her grandma made one. “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.”

The book provides plenty of insite into this life in the wilderness, and at 9 years of age, Angie began to spend more time with her mother and less time with her grandparents. She vividly remembers watching the ladies do birch bark biting when she went out with them on berry picking sojourns. On the cranberry picking trips, she saw the women 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 her first impression of the way the ladies had social exchanges and created exquisite artistic impressions by biting birch bark. She remembers some of the art simply got tossed away. It was not until much later that she herself would learn 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 art form important to First Nation culture.

Over the past three decades, Angie garnered a lot of attention for her artistic skill at birch bark biting. Her beautiful straight teeth still take on the task of this ancient artistic craft (she flosses regularly). You can reach Angelique by email ( This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. ).