Decolonizing Your Shower, One Soap Bar at a Time

When The Tyee visited Sisters Sage, an East Vancouver-based First Nations soap company, in early March, owner and founder Lynn-Marie Angus was preparing the ingredients for a brand new soap.

“I’ve decided on some plants that I locally harvest, and first we’re going to start with devil’s club and cedar,” Angus says. Her ingredients are laid out in a bowl, bucket and jug on a stainless steel countertop. She begins to blend them together in a big plastic bucket using a power drill with a blending attachment.

“Cedar is my top-selling soap, so I think I’ll just put them together and make a super-powerful medicinal soap,” she says.

Devil’s club, which grows wild up and down the coast of the Pacific Northwest, is used by First Nations in the northwest regions where Angus’s Gitxaala of the Ts'msyen (Tsimshian) First Nation and Nisg̱a’a First Nation relations reside.

The plant is anti-inflammatory, Angus says, and she harvests it locally twice a year per her cultural teachings and protocols.

“My family would harvest it, process it, make tea out of it, use it for many different ailments,” she says.

Cedar is also important to the Gitxaala, Cree, Nisg̱a’a and Métis peoples Angus hails from. Growing up and today, Angus uses cedar for both grounding and protection.

“We would have — and we still do — cedar leaves over our doorways, on the ground. I also make cedar soap and cedar smokeless smudge spray, because we would also burn it for purifying and cleansing properties,” says Angus, a member of the Wolf Clan whose traditional name is Kuuth Bam Yaw.

She currently purchases cedar oil from another local entrepreneur but is looking into buying her own still.

Angus has been producing and selling vegan soaps, salves and sprays through Sisters Sage since 2018.

With 10 soap varieties regularly available, she typically makes four different kinds at a time, using sunflower oil, extra-virgin olive oil and coconut oil as the base for most of her soaps. Together with the locally harvested plants that infuse and lightly scent Sisters Sage’s soaps, these ingredients moisturize and soften the skin and help extend the soap’s shelf life.

Each batch takes 24 hours to cure before being sliced and individually wrapped. One batch of soap makes about 86 bars, sold for $7 to $15 each.

The cultural teachings and protocols surrounding harvesting the local B.C. plants used in Angus’s products are central to Sisters Sage, whose business tag line is “Decolonize your shower.”

“I’m not overharvesting, not taking more than I need, and that supplies me, my family, my business,” Angus says. Keeping an eye on the environment is an additional business priority, she adds.

That’s especially important because the cultural appropriation of Indigenous plant medicines and practices by others has led to an overharvesting of the plants Indigenous people rely on. See the dried smudge bundles on sale at your local Whole Foods, Angus says, by way of example.

But the other benefit of harvesting local plants to go into Sisters Sage’s products is the service Angus’s harvest provides for urban Indigenous youth and Elders who can’t gather medicines directly for themselves.

Sisters Sage, Angus says, makes traditional medicines available for customers who aren’t able to harvest on their own.

First Nations: ‘The original entrepreneurs’

Obviously, Angus likes soap. But she views her business more as a means to an end for financial independence and sovereignty, she says.

“That is what, for First Nations people across Canada, being the original entrepreneurs of our lands, it’s always been,” she says.

The inception of the Indian Act in 1876 and the installation of Indian agents as gatekeepers and agents of oppression took that freedom away from First Nations people, Angus says.

For Angus, her business represents “a take-back of our own power, independence and sovereignties.”

This also means that Sisters Sage needs to be aligned with Angus’s morals and values, she says.

“Me being a Ts'msyen and Nisg̱a’a woman from the northwest coast, we come from a potlatch system society. A lot of our dealings, workings, beings, doings and living is being able to take care of ourselves, but also our family and community,” Angus says.

“That is really instilled into my business.”

Angus turned to small-business ownership after years of labouring in B.C.’s highrise construction industry.

“I was working my butt off and I was not getting anywhere,” she says. “I went through lots of racism and sexism, and sexual harassment, and being overlooked for raises and jobs. Even though I was a very hard worker, and skilled.”

Angus began preparing to leave the industry in 2018, by enrolling in the community entrepreneurship course (now known as the accelerated business program) at the University of British Columbia Learning Exchange in the Downtown Eastside neighbourhood.

She also completed UBC’s Aboriginal business management program, in tandem with the British Columbia Institute of Technology’s project management program — all while still working full time in construction.

Collaborating with her sister Melissa-Rae Angus, Lynn-Marie Angus finished the community entrepreneurship course with a business pitch she presented before a panel of about 10 people.

“It was terrifying,” she recalls. But that pitch, for which she was awarded $200, was the beginning of Sisters Sage.

Angus’s hard work has paid off: she’s earned multiple entrepreneur and business awards and continually turns a profit, which provides her the opportunity to mentor and support other young Indigenous and Indigenous women entrepreneurs.

Today, Angus runs Sisters Sage from her storefront location on Kingsway near Knight Street. The storefront, decorated with murals by prominent graffiti artists from the Downtown Eastside, including a portrait of Angus by artist Smokey D, is also where Angus makes and packages her soaps, salves and sprays.

Smokeless sage, cedar everything

The majority of Sisters Sage’s business still happens online, where the Smokeless Smudge Spray is Angus’s top seller.

The idea for the Smokeless Smudge Spray emerged from Angus’s experience living in a basement suite below landlords who would not allow her to burn medicines to smudge inside.

“I created the Smokeless Smudge Spray as an alternative, and I added it to my product line and it quickly became a top-selling product,” she says.

“People like to use it when they’re allergic to smoke, or they’re travelling, when they have babies, in their offices. They just love the scent of it.”

Sisters Sage also supplies organizations like the BC Women's Hospital & Health Centre, which gives Smokeless Smudge Spray bottles to Indigenous moms in the maternity ward to use with their newborns.

“They also use it at VGH in the intensive care unit,” Angus says, referring to Vancouver General Hospital.

The business’s other top sellers include anything with cedar, including the smudge spray and many soap varieties Angus has made with the plant.

Angus’s environment focus extends to the biodegradable and reusable packaging used for Sisters Sage products.

Right now, Sisters Sage has 10 soaps for sale, including a bare-bones “Body Bar” soap without fragrances or dyes, as well as charcoal soap, lavender soap, cedar soap and oatmeal rose soap.

There are also seven varieties of bath “fizzles” or bombs for sale, including lavender, eucalyptus, cedar and sage, and salves in devil’s club and comfrey and hemp seed varieties. The smudge sprays come in cedar and sweetgrass and tobacco scents.

An activist business

With the goal of mentoring other entrepreneurs of colour, particularly young Indigenous and Indigenous women entrepreneurs, Angus regularly speaks on panels, delivers lectures to first-year business students at UBC and provides space for small businesses to sell their wares in her storefront.

Of mentees, Angus says, “I give them opportunities with my platform and share with them what it means to be a business owner, and some of the ins and outs of the day-to-day tasks, and I help make connections for them.”

Last September, Sisters Sage hosted an End of Summer Pop-Up Shop featuring Palestinian artists and artisans, one of three markets featuring other local entrepreneurs that Angus has hosted in her storefront so far.

Angus focuses her activism on fighting for human rights, for First Nations people and Indigenous women in particular; she’s not shy about mixing her politics in with her soap.

Every winter, as her mom taught her to do, Angus holds a clothing and supplies drive for people in the Downtown Eastside.

Last year she held a fundraiser to cover the cost for her Palestinian friend’s family to pass through the Rafah crossing into Egypt during Israel’s ongoing war in Gaza.

Next, Angus hopes to expand Sisters Sage into hotel toiletries.

“Having something on such a large scale will be life changing, intergenerationally. So not just myself, but my family and my community,” she says.

“At this moment, I love where I’m at and I’m so thankful for everything that this community has given me. But I’m looking to set my sights a little bit higher.”

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This article runs in a new section of The Tyee called ‘What Works: The Business of a Healthy Bioregion,’ where you’ll find profiles of people creating the low-carbon, regenerative economy we need from Alaska to central California. Find out more about this project and its funders, Magic Canoe and the Salmon Nation Trust.