Want to find Courage? Let compassion be your compass. Don’t go looking for the one yelling the loudest at the front of the crowd, Courage isn’t always some powerhouse full of fire and fury.
Courage is often a quiet thing who visits us in daily decisions and unsung moments.
Courage is the girl sold on the street by one of her mother’s boyfriends before she was 14, who can’t remember a day in her life spent unafraid or a time she wasn’t shamed for existing, who still finds a spark inside to defy everyone who told her she was meaningless by making her own meaning.
Courage is the young man taught in countless ways that his life does not matter because of the colour of his skin, who knows that safety isn’t possible no matter how hard he works or how successful he becomes, who confronts his rage and turns it into fuel to protect his family and the community he loves by any means necessary.
- melgita’t (Mi’kmaq): courageous, brave | melgita’ieg — We are brave (first person dual exclusive animate). Example: Melgita’t ta’n wen wigij gjigang gisgug (A person has to be brave to live in a city these days)
Courage is the widowed mom of four who is working fourteen hours a day in a garment factory and barely earning enough to live on, who has so little but still risks losing everything to join the union at her factory and organize other workers.
Courage is the spark inside each of us that refuses to quit and just accept things for how they are, it is the gentle reminder that we all deserve better and the voice that doesn’t give up on us — even if we’ve given up on ourselves.
- “nupinqaa NUPINQAA!!! Keep going!!!” -Gisèle Maria Martin, ƛaʔuukʷiʔatḥ /Tla-o-qui-aht
- Source: Learning Our Language Is Like Learning to See in Full Color: An Interview with Gisèle Maria Martin, Langscape Magazine 2019
Courage is the strength to act that allows us to resist oppression to create change against the odds. We don’t need to do great things to become friends with Courage, every time we stand up to injustice or protect what we love, it is there, quietly cheering us on from the depths of our courageous hearts.
Text 2015 written for my 365 Days of Presence project, art journal November 2025
