Growing up in logging camp helped pull me north to Nunavut

Dennis Patterson

A year after Nunavut’s former senator Dennis Patterson’s retirement from Parliament, he’s embarked on a monthly column for Nunatsiaq News, reflecting on what he has learned in 45 years of public life.

This column will be about sharing my experiences of being immersed in public life in the Northwest Territories and Nunavut over the past 45 years, particularly the miracle of the division of the N.W.T. and changing the map of Canada by creating the new territory of Nunavut in 1999.

As I reflect on what I have been a part of, I realize those stories will inevitably be seen through my eyes, no matter how hard I try to be objective.

How did a white boy who grew up in a remote logging camp deep in the rainforest of North Vancouver Island end up happily spending most of his adult life as a public figure in the Eastern Arctic?

I believe that the clue to why I came north lies at least in part in my upbringing in isolation in Woss Camp in the heart of the Nimpkish Valley.

It was not polar bears and caribou that I encountered as a young boy but cougars and bears and deer. Cougars were such a threat in our camp — one mauled a schoolgirl at recess — that the company that owned the logging camp retained a professional cougar hunter, Bud Frost, with dogs who kept cougars away from the camp.

This cougar is an example of the type of threat that was common at the logging camp where Dennis Patterson grew up. This cougar, with yellow eyes reflecting the light, was treed by the camp cougar hunter’s dogs at night. (Photo courtesy of Dennis Patterson)

I remember as a boy seeing the yellow eyes of a cougar which had been driven up a tree by Bud Frost’s dogs in the dark near our camp.

And going to the city was a scary thing for a little boy from an isolated world in Woss Camp. We had no road connections to the outside world — a company railroad was the only way to get out of town.

I remember journeying with my mother by a little yellow passenger rail car called a “speeder” to the coast, where we boarded the Union Steamship SS Catala to take me to the city for dental work.

Early one morning, we were awakened by a crash — the Catala had hit a barge in the city harbour — and I remember rushing out on deck and seeing that barge in the fog and the sharp smell of the sea in the cold morning air.

Later, when we moved to the city, I didn’t want to go. I remember my fear of not being able to find my way home in the five blocks from my school.

At recess the first day, I lashed out at an older, taller boy who had threatened me in some way. I’m not a fighter, but I punched him in the jaw like I’d seen in cowboy movies, and was shocked to see him fall down and hit the ground.

Woss Camp was what shaped my outlook and, I suspect, made me drawn to leave life in big cities like Halifax and Vancouver, where I articled and had opportunities to work as a lawyer, and instead end up in Frobisher Bay (now Iqaluit). In 1975, it had a population of only about 1,500.

So years later, when I was the minister of education and found myself in charge of residential schools, I had some idea, from my own childhood, what a shock it was for kids from small communities to be shipped to larger centres like Frobisher Bay, Rankin Inlet, Yellowknife and Inuvik.

I am not claiming to have experienced what Inuit children sent to residential school had to go through. But those memories from my childhood of the shock of coming to the city from a very small, sheltered world made me think deeply of what those kids were going through.

I became motivated to find a way to shut down those residential schools, which our government ended up doing by establishing Grade 12 in every N.W.T. community.

The Hon. Dennis Patterson represented Nunavut in the Senate from 2008 to 2023. He was premier of the Northwest Territories from 1987 to 1991, and played a key role in the Nunavut land claim agreement.