Being pregnant is hard enough. Being pregnant and having to travel hundreds, sometimes thousands, of kilometres to give birth ? often without your spouse, family or friends for support ? makes what can already be a scary experience even harder.
For many Indigenous women, however, that?s the reality of childbirth. For decades, many healthy, low-risk Indigenous pregnant people have been forced to leave their community weeks in advance of their delivery to a hospital to give birth in hospitals far from home.
Historically, there have always been midwives in Indigenous communities but, as with many traditions, those practices were affected by colonization. In the late 19th century, the Canadian government began evacuating Indigenous women from their home communities to give birth in federally-operated hospitals, as part of a broader campaign of forced assimilation. Still today many rural and remote parts of the country, particularly in the North, lack obstetric and prenatal care services, meaning each year, an estimated 40,000 Canadian women must travel from their home communities to have a hospital birth. This separation from their families can lead to damaging negative outcomes for new mothers and babies ? stress, prematurity, birth complications, and a lack of continuity in post-natal care ? as well as a sense of disconnection from their families. In recent years, there has been a growing revival in Indigenous midwifery with the development of Indigenous birthing centres. P...