Anger is beautiful. Anger is generative. Anger is ancestral.

By Chantelle Ohrling, a justifiably angry defender of Turtle Island

Righteous rage is not simply anger; it is love in its fiercest form, the refusal to let oppression go unanswered.

Anger is beautiful. Anger is generative. Anger is ancestral.

I offer these definitions to contrast with the definitions that may be found in the colonizer’s dictionaries. 

Language is truly beautiful in that it is a tool and cultural archive to be shaped as best suits those who use it. Since so many of our languages have been taken from us and replaced with English, French, Spanish, it’s only fair that we be allowed to reshape and redefine the language we’re forced to use to suit our experiences and narratives. Recreate our destroyed cultural archives. Redefining language, spaces, relationships, emotions is a way of reclaiming our power. 

Righteous Rage is a moral anger that is sparked in response to injustice against inherent human rights. From systemic to interpersonal, this anger fuels appropriate reaction which builds and heals. 

Righteous rage is the sacred, ancestral fury that knows injustice is not meant to be swallowed but spoken, screamed, sung into being. It is the riot which brings freedom from slavery, fuels the gay-liberation movement, and keeps land and water defenders rallying in the face of police brutality. 

Righteous rage is not simply anger; it is love in its fiercest form, the refusal to let oppression go unanswered.

Generative Spite is the opposite of vindictive destructiveness, which seeks “petty ill will or hatred with the disposition to irritate, annoy, or thwart.” 

Generative spite is the alchemy of pain into purpose and the sharpening of defiance into a tool of creation. Generative spite takes every interpersonal insult and doubt, every system that says “you cannot,” and transforms them into a living testament of “I could and did.” 

It is within the poet who was told they would never be heard and now their words echo through generations. Generative spite creates without permission; it crafts, it grows, it persists out of sheer defiance. 

Anger is beautiful.

Anger is beautiful. I know because it’s shaped my bones and imbued my marrow with grace and strength. 

One of the earliest acts of resistance in the “so-called New World” was the burning of La Isabela, Cristoforo Colombo’s first settlement. Five hundred and thirty-three years ago, my ancestors set a blaze whose embers have never gone out – a fire kindled by defiance, flickering and dancing in the face of colonial violence, burning through the genes of every generation since. I carry it still, an inherited rage shaping my bones into fortresses of resilience. Anger fed my ancestors, sustained my people, and carved a path through the smoke of dispossession. I am alive today thanks to my ancestors who spited colonialism with their lives. 

Anger is a tool of survival. Anger is an act of love. 

Audre Lorde reminds us: “Anger, used, does not destroy. Hatred does.” Hatred is the colonizer’s weapon – greedy, consuming, and bottomless. It alchemizes life into death, land into profit, community into ruin. Tar sands, pipelines, poisoned rivers – these are the malignant tumors of hatred metastasized into the land itself. 

Hatred swells alongside profit margins, feeding on itself while devouring everything in its path. The colonizer’s appetite is insatiable.

But anger – anger is sacred. Anger is venerated combustion.

Maya Angelou, in a 2014 interview said, “If you’re not angry, you’re either a stone or you’re too sick to be angry.” And yet, she cautioned, “Bitterness is like cancer. It eats upon the host. It doesn’t do anything to the object of its displeasure.” So we must use our anger. Paint it. Write it. March it. Sing it. Spit it into the face of oppression until it buckles under our relentless flame.

Anger is generative.

Anger is generative. In response to being told about my appointment to a board, a manager I looked up to asked “Are you sure you’ll be able to handle that?” That particular patronization joined the long list of microaggressions which gently and lovingly fan my flames to this day. Since joining that board I’ve completely redone their communications, increased readership, and have advanced DEI initiatives. That was my revenge: not bitterness, but transformation. Now I sit on multiple boards and teach others how to practice inclusivity. 

Yes, I handled that. 

Generative spite has fueled local activist and award-winning poet Wayde Compton, who stood at countless city council meetings demanding the truth about the Black community of Hogan’s Alley – a history deliberately hidden. He spoke again and again until acknowledgment birthed action. First, Hogan’s Alley Memorial Project came together, and then small acknowledgments from the city. 

Now, Hogan’s Alley Society has a community-based land trust in the Downtown Eastside of Vancouver, social housing, and sits on the precipice of a bright sunrise for Black community in Vancouver. 

Righteous anger fuels Nneka Allen, Múthoní Karíukí, and Mide Akerewusi as they continue to shape the industry into a more equitable space for Black fundraisers and Black organisations. When Nneka triggered public disclosure about the racism she, Múthoní, Mide and others experienced while on the board of the AFP Greater Toronto, they and their co-conspirators spoke truth to power and cultivated a community that thrives. 

Today, the Black Canadian Fundraisers Collective, co-founded by Black fundraisers including Nneka and Múthoní, supports a national membership of empowerment and thought leadership. Nneka Allen, Camila Vital Nunes Pereira and Nicole Salmon co-edited the book Collecting Courage, which is taught internationally, and with partner organisations, the Collective has designed and is delivering a capacity development academy to support Black-led, Black-serving, Black-focused organisations and Black fundraisers. 

After the entire AFP Greater Toronto board resigned, Mide stepped in as interim Chapter President and put together an interim board focused on equitable rebuilding. His immense work fueled by righteous anger has built the foundation of a new future for the chapter – one where every member truly belongs. 

When Arturo Alfonso Schomburg, an Afro-Puerto Rican activist, was a child he was told by a teacher that Black people had no “history, heroes, or accomplishments.” He spent the rest of his life collecting that history, and his personal library of over 4,000 books was the beginning of the The Schomburg Collection of Negro Literature and Art collection of the New York Public Library (now known as the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture). 

And when Kendrick Lamar called out colonialism by name and won five Grammys for doing so, that spite was polished into art – a diss track turned into cultural triumph. 

Spite is generative. Spite builds.

Sarah Deer, in “Rage, Indigenous Feminisms, and the Politics of Survival,” writes: “The turning point for me was when I was able to politicize my rage. As a student, I found great comfort in Audre Lorde’s 1981 essay ‘The Uses of Anger.’ I began to explore rage as a cogent response to injustice. I became a volunteer advocate for sexual assault survivors. My mental health drastically improved. My next challenge was to act upon rage in a productive way. I decided to go to law school.” 

Kateri Akiwenzie-Damm in a 2022 CBC interview says, “Righteous anger can fuel so much of our work – not only as writers, but as activists and cultural workers. We can use that energy to create beautiful things, to advance ourselves, our communities, and our families.” Her words are a hymn, a reminder that our anger is not only justified – it is generative.

Just as with the activists and authors above, anger as a healing balm was my reaction to experiencing violence as well. The first fundraising event I planned was months after leaving an abusive relationship for the last time. I began to read Black and Indigenous feminists en masse, and eventually propelled myself to university and into a career of healing on the fuel of justified rage – the rage of having tasted injustice and wanting better for future generations. 

Anger is a powerful, sacred tool. I’m sure that there are many more such stories, and that you have many of your own. 

Anger is ancestral.

Love begets anger in the face of injustice. Angry tears running down our faces water new hope in the scorched remains of colonialism.

Anger is ancestral. Our ancestors knew this sacred alchemy. There are many examples of rage and spite being used to eradicate hate and equitably rebuild. It’s a long lasting tradition on Turtle Island since those first flames set by my Taino ancestors. 

Over time it has helped Black people free themselves from their enslavers, Indigenous Peoples protect land, water, and their rights, and inspired gender expansive folks to pick up and let loose bricks in protest. 

Bountiful spite is focused and singular, though its fruit may be myriad and wide reaching. Its focus is on establishing in the face of destruction, not destruction itself. Authentic anger clarifies and offers determination. 

It is a prescriptive burning which brings healing.

On Turtle Island, Indigenous peoples have always understood the generative power of fire. Controlled burning nurtures the land, clears the way for planting, and regenerates ecosystems. Sometimes destruction is necessary for growth. Sometimes rage is necessary for justice. Righteous anger clears the rot, leaving fertile ground for new life to rise. 

In her powerful critical essay, “Refusal to forgive: Indigenous women’s love and rage,” Rachel Flowers writes, “I hope to reclaim space for Indigenous women’s rage, orienting it around a refusal to forgive, as informing an anticolonial approach to disrupting forms of violence and domination that reify settler colonialism.

“When the dehumanization of all Indigenous peoples is accepted as normal, especially aimed at the minds and bodies of Indigenous women through continued land dispossession and violence, it is unrealistic for settler society to expect us to forgive let alone love. In those moments when we come  together in protest or in remembrance for our sisters (and brothers and non-binary relations) our anger is not abandoned, our resentment is not relinquished; it is because of our profound love for one another.”

Countless stories of indignation throughout history show that anger is a tool of alchemization turning injustice to justice. It’s not enough to stop the flow of hatred and divest from their power; we must build the new and invest in the power of our communities. To get through the never-ending arduous work ahead of us, we must hold on to our pure rage which burns steadily deep in the very structure of our DNA like a coal mine fire. 

Our anger is the spark of revolution. 

When we freed ourselves of slavery, it was out of love for ourselves and our kin. When we take to the streets in protest of police brutality and for Palestine, it is an action of love for the oppressed. Love begets anger in the face of injustice. Angry tears running down our faces water new hope in the scorched remains of colonialism. 

Sarah Dear writes “I used to fear rage. Like many survivors of sexual violence, I spent endless nights trying to physically suppress feelings of rage, desperately hoping that, if I fought hard enough, my corporal body would somehow dissolve my fury. Over the years, I came to understand that this is an exercise in futility. Suppression of rage only caused more problems, emerging as self-hatred with its sinister companion, self-harm. I was terrified of rage primarily because I could not predict what might happen if I expressed, released, or even thought about rage.”

The colonizer is the one that must and does fear our anger. 

They have pathologized it, criminalized it, demonized it. They call it animalistic, uncontrollable, uncivilized. They want us placid, our tongues bitten bloody, our fists unclenched. They have violently punished those who dare to express their anger. Because they know that anger is power. They know that swallowed anger becomes a roiling force banging against our ribs until it cannot be contained. Suppressing anger makes us sick. They know that anger, when unleashed, topples empires. That is why they created the trope of the “angry black woman” and we must reclaim her. 

The colonizer’s vehemence in suppressing our rage is the evidence we need to recover our anger as a powerful tool. 

Anger is love in action.

Anger is love in action. We must decolonize our relationship with anger. Reclaim our birthright. 

Audre Lorde taught us that anger is loaded with information and energy. When fueled by love –  love for ourselves, our people, our earth – anger burns clean, illuminating the path toward liberation. All revolutions have grown into raging flames lit from an angered spark at the oppressive conditions.

Anger has been good to me. It has been a guiding star and a fierce protector. It has picked me up off the floor and straightened my gaze. Anger is not just a fuel; it is hope made flesh. It is the opposite of apathy. It is the howl of ancestors lighting the way forward. It is your muscles unclenching as you scream, as you act, as you take back what was always yours. 

Our ancestors’ fires still burn. Let us carry their flames forward. Let us build in defiance of destruction. 

Let us rage as an act of love.

“In my Native Feminisms course, I spend time during the first class meeting to inform students that they will likely experience justified anger and rage during the course of the semester. Unlike the oft-maligned ‘trigger warning,’ I instead seek to empower students to consider how rage and anger can be intellectual tools for analyzing the contours of injustice. In short, I try to cultivate the classroom I never had – a place to examine the virtues of Indigenous rage.” (Deer, 2010) The way that Sarah Deer has familiarized herself with her anger, used it as fuel, and is now sharing those teachings offers us another way to reclaim our emotional birthright. 

We will continue to organize, collaborate, and demand more from those in power and from ourselves. We will double down in the collective strength of our communities, divest from harmful systems, and build new ones rooted in reciprocity and care. Continue shaping the present with our powerful narratives. 

Channel your righteous anger into never ending fuel for mutual aid, advocacy, and community-centered solutions. Kendrick Lamar reminds us spite can be sharpened into something powerful to win battles and claim victories. 

May our actions be bright with generative spite and light the way for generations to come.