Birch Bark Biting preserved by coincidental names
"I was born at Midnight
Lake, Manitoba," explained Angelique Merasty Levac,"It is bush and nobody
lives there,” about the far northern reaches of central Canada. Angie holds
close memories of a distant place spent with her grandparents in the decades of
the 1950s and 1960s. “Once in a while a few of my siblings or family members
traps there.” It was a Cree people’s playground and belonged to no one else.
"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)
RETURN TO THE DIALOGUE DIRECTORY