Nisichawayasihk Cree Nation’s first female chief says that before she was elected by the First Nation’s members Aug. 24-25, she had her doubts about whether there were enough people who believed that a woman could be the best choice for her to earn a victory.
“There are still some people who have attitudes that women are not the best choice to lead,” said Angela Levasseur in a phone interview with the Thompson Citizen Aug. 29.
Just as clearly, there are many people who do not subscribe to that idea.
“That myth was debunked by the people of Nisichawayasihk Cree Nation because they did vote me in as their first female chief,” she said.
Levasseur received 496 votes, beating out Felix Walker, a former NCN councillor who has also worked in many administrative roles for the first Nation, by 65 votes. Former NCN chief Jerry Primrose received 358 votes and William Elvis Thomas, who has run for chief a number of times, got 325.
Outgoing chief Marcel Moody was not up for re-election, but was a candidate for council and got the most votes in that race, making him Levasseur’s deputy chief for the upcoming term. Incumbent councillors Jeremiah Spence, Cheryl Moore and Ron D. Spence were also re-elected. They are joined on the next council by Kim Linklater and Shirley Linklater. Shirley Linklater has served on council before while Kim Linklater is a first-time councillor.
More than 1,600 NCN citizens voted in the election, including 1,149 on Nelson House, 252 in Thompson, 36 in Leaf Rapids and 190 in Winnipeg. There were also six mail-in ballots.
The chief-elect, who will be sworn in along with the incoming council on Sept. 6, says it was a long night watching from the upper level of the community’s arena while votes were being counted down below.
“It was a pretty close race,” she said, noting that it was nearly 5 a.m. before she left, finally feeling reasonably certain that she would be the winner.
“I didn’t want to get my hopes up or just assume that I would win because, at one point, we were waiting for polls to come in from Winnipeg and Thompson. That could have made things go either way.”
Levasseur has long had an interest in politics and wanting to serve her people, though she didn’t anticipate that it would be as an elected official.
“My ultimate goal was to become one of the lawyers for the nation,” says the recent graduate f Mitchell Hamline School of Law in St. Paul, Minnesota.
Others saw a different path for her.
“I was asked [to run for chief] by community elders, and the majority of the elders were female,” Levasseur says. “I was raised to honour my elders and to respect them and to listen to them. And they were pretty adamant that I was going to run for chief. They were pretty firm and pretty insistent that I run, so I agreed.”
Politics is in Levasseur’s blood. Her great-grandfather Angus Bonner was an NCN chief and she herself ran for positions with the University of Manitoba Students Union when she was enrolled there and was also vice-president of the Native American Law Students Association while attending law school.
Even more importantly, her mother served for many years as the president of the Aboriginal Women of Manitoba in the 1980s and 1990 and Levasseur remembers attending conferences of the Native Women’s Association of Canada and meetings of the Aboriginal Women of Manitoba with her.
“I got to hear some powerful women speak from all types of nations and it was really inspiring to me,” she says. “It was a different sort of education, to get to hear very powerful women speak, grassroots types of leader.”
Now the soon-to-be NCN chief, who has three daughters and a granddaughter, is in the position to serve as that type of role model for upcoming generations.
“I received a message from one woman who was congratulating me and she told me that as an Indigenous female she stands taller now because of this accomplishment, because I was elected as chief,” Levasseur says. “History in the making is a phrase that I keep hearing over and over again, but it is truly a historic moment. We are breaking through barriers that have historically kept women out of the leadership.”
Having a female chief many be a first for NCN in recent times, but over the longer term, it is actually a return to tradition.
“Prior to European contact and prior to colonization, the Cree nation was matriarchal and matrilineal,” Levasseur points put. “We’re coming to a point in history where wrongs are being righted and the matriarchal society is being restored.”
Once she takes over the chief’s role, there are a number of priorities Levasseur wants to address, including self-sufficiency and housing.
“I would like to see our people be empowered,” she said. “I want to move away from dependency on Indigenous Services Canada, dependency on social assistance, dependency on the government in any way, shape or form.”
To do that, the chief-elect, who spent 21 years working as a teacher, says there needs to be a focus on education.
“I want our people to become educated, to get training. I want them to achieve all of their career goals and go to college, go to university, go to trade school.”
Levasseur believes NCN can leverage some of the training its members are already receiving to help it tackle the housing issue.
“We are creating a lot of carpenters in NCN who have the skills to build quality housing and what we need to do as a nation is to make the investment in materials that are not going to have houses falling apart,” she said.
Residents of the homes have a role to play as well.
“I want to see our leadership encourage people to take responsibility for their home, to take more responsibility for the repairs and maintenance of their home,” she says. “I also want people to know how to do basic home maintenance, to be able to do repairs. Housing and poverty are the very factors that keep First Nations people in the position where they are constantly struggling and finding themselves to be dependent on the government and I want to reverse the trend.”
Although much has changed for her this summer, from graduating law school to being elected as NCN’s next chief, Levasseur says she’s taking everything in stride and having faith that the Creator will help guide her along the right path.
“I’m very excited to work with my colleagues,” she said.
