Birch Bark Biting Fundamentals -- Art of Angelique Merasty Levac

Angelique Merasty Levac has been an ambassador for the Woodland Cree nation through her expertise as a birch bark biting artist from Northern Manitoba. She is prolific at producing the art from birch bark.

“I go home once a year and search for my birch bark in Manitoba. It takes me about three to four days to find the bark, free of knot, white birch, with few branches.

"I have to search for the straight tree and when I find it usually the first layer is weather damaged, and that’s no good, and sometimes the second layer is too. You use the third, fourth, and sometimes fifth layer if you’re lucky,” explains Angelique.

“I don’t cut the trees, don’t want damage the tree. I go and sample and cut it a bit and test it, since sometimes they look good but aren’t. What I do is, I try to get most of it from one tree, far as I can reach. Now I cut the layers up, and peel it a bit, cut into squares, and do it again by finding another tree, in Manitoba, mostly Pukatawagan area,” north of Lynn Lake, Manitoba.

“I bring the birch bark home and have to rest and get into a my own little world, when I am doing this birch bark biting. I store the pieces. I have to be thinking clearly, then I will bring out the birch bark, and it has to be peeled into strips. Sometimes peeling the bark causes a lot of ripping. At all times I am aiming for a large piece but this is not often possible, due to ripping the bark as I am peeling it.”

Angelque says, “I will fold the piece into a small square by folding it again, but instead of doing a cut-out, what I do is make a tooth impression, bite a design, for example, a hummingbird, and I picture his wings and his body, and I start to bite at his beak, and then his head and the wings and the body, and that’s how I picture it in my head.

“By biting, what I should say is you cannot bite too hard or you puncture a hole through the bark. You have to bite hard enough to produce a bruise with your teeth but if you bite too hard the pressure will destroy the bark. It’s a matter of pressure, also to create the image and the contrast in the image by bruising the bark.

"I use the teeth on each side, with the sharpest tooth, and however I feel comfortable, and it depends on the design, and that is how I bruise the birch bark which makes the designs come out.”

It is intricate work, “And when I finish I open it by unfolding, once, for I cannot refold the bark, it will not line up properly twice. All my designs have to be done exactly in one effort with each part, flowers, wings, eyes, other parts to a piece, complete in my head, until it’s finished.

"When it is finished I leave quarter or half inch on each side so it can be framed. It has to be framed with acid free matting, and the birch bark cannot be left long on paper that is not acid-free.”

This art is becoming rare, “Everybody’s teeth marks are different, and I didn’t learn this overnight. I started in 1980, and I have had a lot of practice, and I owe my teacher, Angelique Merasty. She said, ‘Whatever I taught you here you cannot learn overnight. You have to go home and practice,' and I went home and did that.’”

Regarding the medium in which she works, “If you store it properly birch bark has an endless shelf life, but it’s getting harder to find. I think the good bark is going fast, and when I am travelling, I watch the forest and I wonder if the ozone or the environment is affecting the tops of the trees, the branches at the crown at the top of the trees are dying, and breaking off.

"When I am travelling I am looking at the birch bark and what I see is all the trees are damaged on the top, in all provinces. I am not looking for prospective trees, just looking at birch bark. Nevertheless I continue to work at my art and currently I have orders from Toronto, among other places, and I still produce lots of the the art every year.”

Angelique’s book, God Opens Doors (Kisemanitow Peyohtena Iskwatem) came out from a Winnipeg-based, Canada-USA publisher, summer of 2012.

Freelance Writing by Mack McColl 

Angelique Merasty Levac discusses how God Opens Doors

Angelique is author of a book entitled God Opens Doors, Kisemanitow Peyohtena Iskwahtem, in print September 2012. The publisher is Indian Life Ministries, and they have followed her art and business career and admired her Christian walk for many years.

"I was born at Midnight Lake, Manitoba," said Angelique Merasty Levac. "It is bush and nobody lives there,” in the far northern reaches of central Canada. Angie holds close to her memories of a distant place spent with her grandparents in the decades of the 1950s and 1960s. She was toddling around the wilderness with her grandparents from the time she was a one year old. That was when she was born, and her mother had a rush of kids come, and so Angie was given to the grandparents to raise. Today, the same place is as wild as it once was, when she was a babe in the woods. “Once in a while a few of my siblings or family members traps there.” It is a Cree people’s playground and belongs to no one else.

I lived beside a nice lake," and she enjoyed the company of loons going 'co-co-op' in the morning hours, she recollects, "My grandparents tried to teach me how to trap when I was six years old." Her grandmother gave her a tiny squirrel trap and showed her where to set the trap under a bundle of roots at the base of a tree.

They were on the lakeside close to the family dwelling, which was a large canvas tent, and Angie would not stray. Her grandmother, she recalls, provided explicit instructions about being very patient when trapping. She had to leave the place alone to permit the process to take its course.

Little Angie couldn’t wait till the grandparents went to sleep and she 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,” she hollered, with a sudden affinity for nature, for the squirrel that wasn't there.

It was a lesson that she can freshly recall, and she smiles about the painful few minutes while she inspects her feminine fingers. This trapping snarl proved to be 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 made up of the old itinerant way of connecting with the land and which had ever made the vast domain their home. 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.

"My grandpa never lived in one place," Angie explained, and the family packed their large tent and barrel stove and set off looking for the right place in a particular time of year. She said it was a lean existence.

"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 perhaps help to preserve a fast disappearing cultural practice of the Woodland Cree. 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).

It is a strangely important coincidence that when she met her mentor of the art form the woman was also named Angelique Merasty (Angie’s maiden name). The mentor Angelique Merasty has passed away but not before she almost miraculously passed the legacy onto Angelique Merasty Levac, doing so under the most difficult conditions imaginable.

Angie’s gravitation to the art form is partly owed to bingo. Her mentor Angelique Merasty loved to play and was sitting waiting for a taxi ride to the bingo hall one evening in Beaver Lake, Saskatchewan. Part of the miracle was that the mentor sat in the company of an anthropologist while she waited, and to pass the time sitting beside the fire in winter she reached over and peeled a piece of birch bark off a log that had thawed, and she bit into it, and an exquisite piece of art was born.

The taxi arrived and she cheerfully, wordlessly (for she never spoke English) handed the birch bark biting to the professor who promptly sent it to the Manitoba Museum of Man in Winnipeg, and this prompted a full investigation and revelation of her ability. Soon articles began to appear detailing the art and the artist. And the mentor while being interviewed once expressed a wish to pass the craft along to someone before it was forgotten. Angelique the student saw this quote in a magazine article when she was 24 years of age

It is important to realize the way Angie grew up. She did not speak English until she was between 14 and 15 years of age; she spoke only Cree. She grew up in the days prior to Bill C-31 in Canada when a lot of Indian people were cut off from their Status by marriage, and Angie had no access to school, therefore, because her mother had been stripped of her Status by marriage to a Metis man.

Indeed, our Angie did not read English until she taught herself by reading the Holy Bible, and by the time she was 24 she had proficiency enough to read, and there she stood in a line-up at the post office in Uranium City, amazed to see her name described in a magazine.

She stared at the magazine story about Angelique Merasty, but it was not herself, except it was her name, a woman who was a practitioner of an ancient art form, a Cree culture art form, the artform she had seen her grandmother and mother practicing in the berry patches, and this same Angelique Merasty in the article described how she, "would like to pass this Native art form onto another."

Angie had those recollections of the ladies in the berry patches taking a rest to bite into birch bark and she decided thereabouts that the passing ought to be to herself. She credits the 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, and more awards to come in 2009. 

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