Mel Pervais

Melvin "Mel" Pervais (born 1940) is a Canadian-American business executive, entrepreneur, engineer and member of the Ojibwa Nation.

Pervais was born and raised on the Fort William Reserve near Thunder Bay, Ontario, the eldest son of eight children.

At age five he began his academic studies in a one-room schoolhouse, housing eight grades, on the reserve.

At age twelve he was sent to a Jesuit-run boarding school for Indian boys, the Garnier Residential School, 500 mi away in Spanish, Ontario, and graduated at sixteen.

At age sixteen, Pervais started work as a night watchman for the Jones Construction Company.

Two months later, he took the opportunity to begin an apprenticeship as an instrument technician with Noranda Mines in Cutler, Ontario.

After the Fords sold it in 1952, it traded hands several times.

When Pervais took it over, the ranch was in poor shape; the barns were falling apart and its perimeter was unfenced.

Over the next seventeen years, he held various positions in the power generation industry before joining Johnson Controls in 1973 as the manager of a newly formed calibration engineering department.

Pervais redirected the department's focus to nuclear power, boosting sales from $100,000 to $5 million over three years.

Pervais left Johnson Controls in 1976 and, with his expertise and $10,000, started Amalgamated Services in Philadelphia with a business partner, providing engineering services to nuclear power plants.

In 1979 the company merged with Cataract Engineering and Construction and Pervais became president.

Never shy about his Indian heritage, Cataract's logo had an Indian motif and the company strived to hire Indian employees.

Cataract also used a unique bonus and salary system to discourage sick days and draw talent from other companies; it was not uncommon for workers to out-earn their bosses, with some field technicians earning $90,000 a year.

In 1982 Pervais was invited by President Ronald Reagan to serve on a private sector task force that encouraged support of community projects including homes for the elderly and day care centers.

The Los Angeles Times reported in 1984 that Pervais was one of the wealthiest Native Americans in the United States.

In 1987, Pervais bought the 1400 acre Chief Joseph Ranch, including a 5000 sqft lodge built in 1917, a summer home for the family of William S. Ford.

By the early 1990s a sharp decline in revenue resulted in Cataract defaulting on substantial obligations for direct debt and guarantees of ESOT loans.

Due to Cataract's inability to pay it's debt, The Prudential Insurance Company of America, Cataract's main creditor, was in a position to shut down Cataract's operations through foreclosing on its security interest in the company's assets.

Rather than allow Prudential to foreclose on Cataract, a new investor group was located to form a Pennsylvania corporation to acquire the defaulted loans.

In 1991, Pervais returned from retirement to found Rhodium 2001, dedicated to recycling materials from scrapped catalytic converters.

Pervais put more than $2 million of his own money into the new company, originally housed in a remodeled calving barn on his ranch.

Pervais and partner Don Golbeck bought a license to a process developed by metallurgist inventor and chemical engineer C.A. Dickey to refine precious group metals from automotive catalytic converters, a process they used to retrieve a number of materials, including fine sand for the asphalt industry and platinum, palladium and rhodium compounds to sell to refiners.

Cataract, Inc ceased operations effective Jun 1, 1993.

At that time Cataract's obligations to Prudential exceeded the value of Cataract's assets by over $10,000,000.

The Trustees of Cataract obtained a payment of $43,665 to split among the remaining employees.

An employee with 20,000 shares of stock was left with a value of around $355.

At the time, Cataract had 500 engineers and technicians and reported annual sales of $50 million.

He retired at age 45 to focus on a horse breeding and cattle operation on the Chief Joseph Ranch near Darby, Montana.

Pervais received honorary Doctorates of Engineering from Montana State University in 1995 and Lakehead University in 1996.

Pervais is a former member of the United Indian Development Association, a Los Angeles organization that provides consulting services to Indian businesses.

He is on the council of trustees with United National Indian Tribal Youth Inc. (UNITY), a national organization promoting personal development, citizenship and leadership among Native American youth.

Rhodium 2001's extraction process is notable for being environmentally friendly, requiring no smelter nor airborne emissions, and for being a closely guarded secret.

It took two years of research and development by Dickey, who claimed it involved temperature and pressure.

Neither Pervais, nor Dickey, were willing to reveal more about the process than that, for fear that other competitors might adopt it, rendering their company irrelevant.

Said Pervais, "If you're an environmentalist, it's probably the greatest invention. I don't need a polluting process. I'd stay retired if that was the case."

Pervais, whose grandfather was a tribal chief, has said his father pushed him into the non-Native American world at an early age.

"It was the most traumatic thing he ever did," he says.

"But it was the best thing he ever did for me."

Pervais is an advocate for self-sufficiency in the Native American community and has spoken before students and other groups arguing that Native Americans must stop relying on federal aid and begin supporting themselves in the free-enterprise system.