Aboriginal - Girls Action Foundation

38 Josephine O’Brien
By Josephine O’Brien
As an Aboriginal woman who has gone through great difficulty in my own life, I
can honestly say I have compassion. The first time I moved from my hometown
community of Ross River I was six years old. This community had a population of 600
people, almost all were First Nations. I was used to driving down the road to go hunting
and camping every weekend in the bush, eating moose meat and guts on the side of the
road and all this I had in common with the majority of my classmates. This was normal to
me. When we moved to the Yukon capital Whitehorse, a population of 25,000 people, I
had no idea how much my life would change. I am a minority in this country of Canada,
but now I could see it and feel it. Little did I know this feeling I struggled with my entire
life, this feeling of being an outsider would one day lead me to have great compassion
for my people. It led me to study more, to question more and to understand more on
why I would feel like this when my culture and my tradition was so rich in stories of great
leaders, compassionate communities, strong people and most of all strong women.
I believe leadership is a form of compassion. The strength it takes to put yourself into
other people’s shoes and to feel what they feel and to have that deep urge to want to
help in any way you possibly can to make their life better is something special. As a First
Nations woman in this day and age, there are hardships to being First Nations and there
are hardships to being a woman. First of all, as a First Nations person, I am still struggling
with healing from intergenerational impacts brought on by historical genocide of my
people. Second of all as a woman, I struggle with feeling equal to a man. We all know in
this world today there are still many forms of racism and sexism that come alive through
media, politics and society. This is why, to me, Aboriginal women leaders are some of
the strongest leaders in the world. They sometimes must stand alone in the hardest of
times. These are the women I admire most in life because they have the same values I do:
compassion for their family, their community and their world.
Leadership, to me, is the strong focus of your attention to the people that matter most
to you. To me, the people that matter most are my family, not only my blood relations
but also my community and the world community. There is a First Nations saying that it
takes a whole community to raise a child. I have heard of this happening in stories about