A carpentry career built on experience
Fort Resolution's Michael Lafferty points
to his worn tool belt as his credentials
Paul Bickford
Northern News Services
Monday, June 15, 2015
DENINU KU'E/FORT RESOLUTION
Michael Lafferty's skills as a carpenter are all self-taught.
Michael Lafferty, a self-taught carpenter in Fort Resolution, stands inside of a gazebo he is building on Mission Island for Deninu Ku'e First Nation. - Paul Bickford/NNSL photo |
Lafferty - who is better known in his hometown of Fort Resolution by his nickname Mickey Boy - started figuring out how to be a carpenter when he was just 11 or 12 years old.
"I got a measuring tape and figured out what the one-eighths and the sixteenths are, and started from there," he said. "When I was a kid, I used to make little houses."
Those would be small play houses and tree houses.
"Just little houses where I could store my stuff out of the rain," Lafferty said, explaining that included toys and such things.
"You see a hammer, you see a board," he said of why he started building.
"It wasn't professionally like we do now. It started from there."
When he was growing up, Lafferty actually didn't hope to become a carpenter, but a police officer.
"I didn't have the education, even for carpentry," he recalled. "I quit school and went into the bush, and learned the way of life out there."
Lafferty left school when he was about 11 or 12, or, as he described it, between Grade 5 and 6.
In the bush, he learned traditional skills like trapping.
"And then I figured that wasn't for me," he said of a life in the bush, adding that's when he turned to carpentry because he had to do something. "I started labour work and worked my way up."
His career in carpentry really began in about 1988 when Lafferty - now 50 - was in his early 20s. He headed back to school to take adult upgrading courses at Aurora College in Fort Smith and earned the equivalent of Grade 8.
When he worked a six-month contract to help build the accommodations at Diavik Mine as it was being set up, the company offered to put him through school to become a certified carpenter, but he told them he didn't have the required Grade 10.
"They said, 'It's OK. We'll help you through it,'" he recalled. "And I asked them, 'Why do you want to do that?' and they said, "You look like a carpenter.'"
However, Lafferty has no plans to return to school.
"Who's going to pay my bills?" he asked, adding he has to continue paying for his truck, boat and other things.
Lafferty doesn't have to think when asked which is more important - a piece of paper to say you are a certified carpenter or just the knowledge to do the work.
"The piece of paper, because you can get more money," explained Lafferty, who has a brother who is a certified Red Seal carpenter.
"I do a lot of work for people and it's good work, and it's cheap."
Among those jobs has been work for construction companies in Yellowknife and Fort Smith. Plus, he worked for eight years at the Thor Lake project of Avalon Rare Metals Inc.
Most recently, he has been building his first gazebo for Deninu Ku'e First Nation at a new cabin area on Mission Island, just outside Fort Resolution.
Lafferty joked that his worn carpenter's belt - he is on his third one - is proof to employers that he has a lot of experience in the trade, noting, "That's my reference right there."
