Finding joy after trauma: Winnipeg man carves a path to happiness

On the surface, it might have looked like Frederick Lyle Spence was winning at the game of life. Born and raised on Peguis First Nation, Spence moved to Winnipeg after graduating from high school, got a job in the construction industry, became a red seal journeyman electrician, and completed an electrical engineering technology diploma at Red River Community College.

Everything appeared to be going along just fine; not a cloud on the horizon. But Spence was struggling emotionally, spiritually and mentally.

A tragic event in his teens — he lost a dear friend to suicide — and the effects of intergenerational trauma from growing up on a reserve had left him ailing on the inside. Increasingly, he had been soothing himself with drugs and alcohol.

Deep down, he knew something had to change.

There was no singular event that brought him to a place where he came to that realization. It was more an ongoing inner-nagging that he wasn’t happy with his life.

Then on Nov. 7, 2015, he woke up and decided he needed to take a different path.

“I said: ‘That’s it. I’m done. I’m done with this way of life and I’m gonna start experiencing life in a different way,’ ” Spence recalls. “I just remember thinking: ‘I’m not really living a life here. I’m not really enjoying anything. I’m not experiencing the types of things that I really want. I’m not happy and I don’t feel joy.’ I couldn’t remember the last time I had felt that emotion. So that was it.”

Spence started a new journey that day; one that now regularly brings him and others many moments of joy.

While finding new ways to navigate life, he discovered a set of tools to launch his own business —Spence Custom Carving a Winnipeg-based soapstone carving business that takes custom orders for handmade Indigenous art and also provides workshops to schools, businesses, associations and individuals.

Carving has been a main source of therapeutic release in Spence’s recovery journey and he shares that experience so others can have a similar outlet.

“It’s given me purpose and it’s given me an identity — something that I struggled with a lot,” he explains. “I was lost and kind of just going through life not really knowing who I was — survival mode.

“The response and the feedback I get from other people is incredible. I’m very invested in the participants. I want to make sure they feel the same joy that I do.

“When I first started, I thought I was being really selfish because in a back-handed way I am doing this for myself; because it is soul-feeding. It gives you purpose.”

Spence’s new path started where it first began; living with his parents for the first nine months of his sobriety. Back on the reserve, he found comfort in ceremony, language classes and therapy. It’s also where he wandered out to his father’s shed one day and found some carving tools. It was close to Christmas, he didn’t have any money and he had his sister’s name in the gift draw. So, he got to work and did some wood carving.

“That was kind of it, where it started,” he says. “It was like where I knew if my hands are busy, my mind is busy. I just created something. I was proud of myself.

“It was almost like an instantaneous connection and I thought: ‘This is so mentally beneficial for me.’ Especially because I didn’t think about my past, I didn’t think about the trauma. I didn’t think about the shame or the guilt. All I thought about was what I was doing.”

Spence continued with carving, eventually switching to soapstone. His first workshops were part of some volunteer work he was doing with Waterways, a non-profit organization that empowers Indigenous youth through sport and recreation.

That experience led to a weekly arts program at Siloam Mission and more workshops; at places like the Tina Fontaine Foundation and CEDA, an inner-city community-based organization that serves students and families, teachers and school administration.

“I wanted to share something that really brought me a lot of joy, and I wanted to impact the most vulnerable population, the people that I thought needed it the most,” he says.

Restrictions owing to the pandemic limited his opportunities, but momentum is building again and in January of 2023, Spence took a leap of faith — putting down his electrical tools and committing himself full-time to his carving business. This year, he’s had a full slate of workshops and sold plenty of his work at local markets. He also helped coach Manitoba’s canoeing team at the North American Indigenous Games in Nova Scotia and was a presenter at the 2023 International Indigenous Tourism Conference held last March in Winnipeg, where he worked with the Indigenous Tourism Association of Manitoba to help promote tourism in the province.

And perhaps most importantly, he’s had the opportunity to spend plenty of time with his five-year-old son Kona.

While Spence’s shop is currently set up in his garage, his long-term plan is to have a community-based gallery space where a variety of workshops can be held and local artists can have a safe pace to create and sell their work.

“That’s the other part of this, and it’s a big one; goal setting,” says the 33-year-old Spence. “Seeing something in the future. Seeing your potential of having something in the future. That’s something I didn’t do for 10 years. I honestly didn’t care if I lived.

“It didn’t happen right away when I got sober. It took me a year or two because what I imagined was happiness was a wife, the white picket fence, a house and a kid — maybe a dog — or something like that. The way you’re brainwashed to think what happiness is. When really, you need to find it within you. That’s what all of this does for me.”