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Bridget Perrier

the power of one

YWCA Toronto women of distinction award 2006:
Turning Point award

Bridget Perrier’s life story closely parallels those of the murdered and missing aboriginal women Canadians learned about from Vancouver’s Downtown East side -- with one important twist. A deathbed promise to her dying son steered her life in a new direction.

Ms. Perrier’s own experience of abuse, addiction, street life and loss could have led her down that same path to tragic death. Instead, overcoming hardship compelled her to be there for other young aboriginal women. Ms. Perrier is currently a successful student in the George Brown Community Worker program. A friend, mentor and the mother of two, Ms Perrier is a growing force for good within her community. Ms. Perrier is the YWCA of Toronto Turning Point Woman of Distinction.

Born in Thunder Bay Ontario to a mother of Ojibwa descent, Ms. Perrier was given up for adoption at five weeks. She was raised in a loving non-Native Catholic family, but at a young age a close friend of her family sexually abused her. Ms. Perrier became distant as a result of this terrible secret. By Grade 6, Ms. Perrier started acting out the distress she felt inside. Her parents tried counselling, and eventually group homes, but she ran away at every opportunity. Ms. Perrier fell in with a group of friends whose toughness matched her sense of bitterness. 

Although still a child, she was in deep distress, and by 12 she had been admitted to rehab for addiction, and was working the streets as a sex-trade worker in Thunder Bay and Winnipeg. At 15, Ms. Perrier became pregnant, and continued to struggle with her addiction. Shortly after her son Tanner’s birth he was diagnosed with Acute Lymphocytic Leukemia. Ms. Perrier and her son were immediately airlifted to the Hospital for Sick Children in Toronto so that he could receive treatment.

A thousand miles from home, caring for a dying child without the foundation to cope with such grief, and still labouring under the shadow of sexual abuse and rejection by her birth family, Ms. Perrier fell back on what she knew best.  Soon she was dependent on prescription painkillers to numb the reality of working the streets in Toronto. As a result of a drug charge Ms. Perrier was sentenced to time in jail and was released just three days before her son passed away. On his deathbed, five-year old Tanner made his young mother “pinkie swear” that she would straighten out. It is this promise to her son that has fuelled her transformation to overcome addiction, get off the street and support other young aboriginal women who are heading down paths similar to her own.

Lost and alone with no idea how to live up to her pledge to her son, Ms. Perrier arrived at YWCA Toronto’s 1st Stop Woodlawn shelter for young women. Recently pregnant again and struggling to come off drugs, she knew she was ready to get out of the sex trade, but she didn’t know how.  Surrounded by people who cared, Ms. Perrier got her high school diploma, moved into Anduhyaun Second Stage housing and began to turn her life around.

Today, Ms. Perrier lives in a co-op where she is a central player in the community and measures each day of this new life against those earlier times. She has put down roots, provides a stable home for her two children and has extended the benefit of her hard-won strength as a predictable support for other young aboriginal women.

Anxious to find a sustainable means of support and to demonstrate to her children, her community and most of all herself, that she could live up to the promise she made to her son, Ms. Perrier went back to school. Currently studying to become a Community Worker, Bridget’s remarkable turnaround gives her credibility with those still close to the street. With Bridget’s encouragement, family and friends have overcome their fear of school. She supports the women  in her community by offering to baby-sit and take into her home women and girls in their time of need. Ms. Perrier has advocated for aboriginal women struggling with child custody issues, and for family members who are struggling with addictions. In all her dealings with others, making peace with her own past has been essential to seeing the humanity of others isolated from much-needed supports by the stigmas of class, race and street-involvement.

As part of the community worker program, Ms. Perrier is completing a placement at the Native Child program co-facilitating groups including an initiative on gun violence to high risk youth, and an employment group.  

Ms. Perrier survived a deeply troubled youth, struggled to turn her life around and has become a model for other women whose lives have been shattered by loss of identity, sexual abuse and poverty in the aboriginal community. Her own life transformation is now a tool in the transformation process of others. From a world regulated by the criminal courts and intruded on by the welfare state --where trusting social workers was an impossibility—Ms. Perrier is now poised to become the sort of community worker she at one time needed: One who has "been there" and who does not judge. 

Ms. Perrier lives in Toronto with her daughters Briar Rose, and Soleil in a home that is always open to other aboriginal women struggling to survive.

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