Exploring Theme: "Indigenous Birthing Practices"

‘There was a lot of bad outcomes … miscarriages’: health official CBC Indigenous: It was New Year’s Eve when Tenielle Easter started bleeding. Staff at the nearby hospital confirmed her fears — she was having a miscarriage. “It was very, very hard and traumatizing for me,” she said. “I didn’t know what to do. I...

Group aims to transform their community through maternal support, traditional teachings CBC Indigenous: Helping empower women is at the heart of what a collective of Kanien’kehá:ka birth helpers are doing in their community. They’re called Konwati’shatstenhsherawi’s, which means “women are giving each other power” in Kanien’kéha, or the Mohawk language. “We’re communal people,” said Jody Jacobs, who...

For decades, Inuit women in northern Quebec had to travel south, far from family and support, to give birth. That changed in 1986 when the North’s first midwifery clinic opened in Puvirnituq Retired midwives Akinisie Qumaluk, right, and Leah Qinuajuak in a photo from their early years working in the maternity clinic at the Inuulitsivik...

Communities like Kehewin Cree Nation in Alberta are restoring birthing traditions CBC News: On the shore of Kehiwin Lake, four mothers cradle their babies’ placentas in a ceremony held along a newly cleared trail in the bush of the Kehewin Cree Nation in northeast Alberta. Each baby is swaddled in a different coloured fabric and...

Traditional birthing practices are part of personal and community healing, says midwifery student CBC: Ellen Blais was taken from her mother when she was a few hours old. As a Sixties Scoop survivor, Blais didn’t grow up knowing her community, her culture or who she was.  “I was adopted into a non-Indigenous home and there...