God Opens Doors: Kisemanitow Peyohtena Iskwahtem

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"I hope people will read this book to understand the importance of perseverance. Angie may have difficulty pronouncing the word in English but Angie’s picture should be in the dictionary beside the definition of perseverance."
Randy Dakota,

friend, musician, welder, boilermaker

A biographical account of coming to a faith in the Northern Manitoba wilderness and translating it into business success in Briitish Columbia

Anglieque's Story of Faith told to Mack McColl

"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. Angelique Merasty Levac, artist, business woman, and mother, has contemplated telling the story about her unique life for some time now. She is comfortable and successful in the modern world and thrives in her Christian walk and in her art and her business but her story begins with citizenship in an ancient world. She believes God opened the door for her to change her life.

Angelique Merasty Levac – Woodland Cree birch biting artist and business person tells her story to author Mack McColl

Kisemanitow Peyohtena Iskwahtem (God Opens Doors)

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..........