Pierre Rigaud (b. 1920)
Pierre Rigaud was born in Mauves-Sur-Loire, France. He took charge of the family business to trade and train horses on his small family farm, but he wanted to be a priest and missionary. He attended the seminary at La Brosse-Montceaux with well-known northerners Jean-Marie Mouchet, Pierre Veyrat and Denis Buliard.1) During the Second World War, the Nazis discovered members of the Oblate community were assisting in the coordination of allied air drops of weapons for the resistance. Pierre Rigaud was fixing weapons damaged in the drops and Pierre Veyrat was creating false identity cards. In July 1944, the Gestapo discovered parachutes and empty weapon containers hidden in a nearby cemetery. They ordered the Oblates from their cloister and tortured a suspected brother, two priests and two seminarians. One of the priests was shot before a Wehrmacht regular army colonel arrived and the killing stopped. The remaining Oblates faced the possibility of a concentration camp but were liberated by the Allied Forces. By November, the scattered Oblate seminarians returned to their studies and Father Pierre Rigaud was ordained in July 1946.2)
Father Rigaud OMI was sent to the Yukon with Father Veyrat and Dennis Buliard. He spent seven months at Battleford learning English and then, in the summer of 1947, Father Yvon Levaque and Rigaud met at the Dawson Creek train station and travelled up the highway to Fort Nelson. From there Rigaud took the bus to Lower Post where he joined Fathers Mouchet and Poullet.3)
In 1948, Father Rigaud stripped abandoned military barracks to wire the church and day school in Burwash and Henri Jacquot let him hook the system to his hotel generator. After this he built a church at Snag and then moved to Ross River in 1951 and spent the next sixteen years at St. Michael's mission.4) Rigaud was in Faro when a forest fire burned the new town in 1969. Al Rosen was in charge of rebuilding, and he offered Father Rigaud the choice of any available lot for the new church. He was told to build a multi-faith church but only the Catholics had money. He had $25,000 and for $55 he won a bid on a vacant pan-abode school and teacherage from [Elsa]. He hired a local construction company (Doug Thomas and partner Josh VanVugt) who dismantled and reconstructed the church. Al Kulan was living in Vancouver, and he found a truck for the church and Rigaud went down and picked up the aluminium roofing. The first ecumenical church in the Yukon, the Church of the Apostles, held its inaugural service on Thanksgiving 1969. Rigaud organized a youth camp some forty km out of Faro and provided a range of other activities for the youth. Locals supplied a Valmont skidoo and he made an eleven-day trip to Norman Wells in 1972.5)
Bishop Thomas Lobsinger assigned Father Rigaud to Teslin in 1990, and he returned to the Kluane district in 1994. At age 85, he was the pastor of Our Lady of the Way in Haines Junction and the churches in Burwash Landing and Beaver Creek. 6) Rigaud spent the final fifteen years of his ministry in Haines Junction and then retired in 2009 to the Oblate Centre in Whitehorse.7)
Father Rigaud was an integral part of every community he lived in. He became very interested in dog mushing while in Ross River. He entered his team in the Sourdough Rendezvous competition and placed second in 1962 and first place in 1963. He arrived in Faro in 1969. He supervised and assisted the youth in many sporting activities and was known for his firmness and unrelenting fairness. Faro residents began the annual Father Rigaud Peewee Hockey Tournament in his honour and the tournament became the highlight of the hockey season. Father Rigaud was inducted into the Yukon Sport Hall of Fame in 1992 for his contribution to the sports of dog mushing and hockey.8)