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Kanahus Manuel: One of my movement sisters, she talked about not registering her babies. She talked about having her babies free and out of the hospital. She also told me about a couple from Lil'Wat First Nation near Pemberton who were not registering their children. She was pregnant and I was also five months pregnant, and she asked me to be at her birth. Her birth was the most amazing thing—you could see the snowcapped mountains and the lake, and she had a fire at the foot of her bed—it was just a beautiful birth. She wanted to have it as traditional as she could. It was a first child for both of us, and it really opened my eyes up to the belief we as Indigenous women can birth our babies of our nation and not be dependent on any other colonial type of hospital system.
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To me, it means being able to have a vision of where we want to be as native people, how we want to raise this next generation. We can't talk about liberation if we're continuing to birth children into the system, to colonize our own children—their birth and their education. Not registering is breaking away from these institutions.
People ask me, "How do you survive without the child tax?" Especially native parents who don't have any income or low income. We just learn to survive without it. Sometimes we have to be dependent on that system to heal our family. It does become hard, especially with dental, and having to eat a portion of our food from the store. When we're on the road especially, that's a big issue. But the aim is always autonomy and sovereignty. We have to depend on ourselves, we can't depend on a system. We're going to have to find those people in our nations and movements that could provide those services for our people.What does a traditional birth ceremony look like?
There's a lot of knowledge that's sacred, that people don't want to share. But in general, the birth of a child is a powerful ceremony in itself. Whether you're connected to any type of religion or spiritual way, this is powerful. And women will connect to that power in their own way. That's their ceremony with their children. It doesn't matter who you are or where you're at, you're going to feel that. I feel that by going into the hospital system you interrupt that powerful ceremony.
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Everybody's always having babies. There's a demand for native birth workers to attend because of the distance away from registered midwives. The last birth I went to I actually drove 15 hours or so north to go stay there for two weeks waiting for the baby to come. Since I have four children it's hard to get out to births. I want to raise at least my daughters in this birth world, I want them to attend births, as well. We should have traditional midwives in our communities, but because of colonization and residential schools, because of all these impacts we don't have our traditional midwives. So there's a real push to learn ourselves as much as we can and to find those knowledge keepers all throughout our territory. We started to become those resource people for our nations, just learning as much as we can, sharing skills at workshops, bringing people in to teach about birthing practices—that's going to start bringing the conversation back.Have you ever run into challenges or complications?
There's never been any type of complications with our births. But the reality is we do need to prepare. There's continuous training. A baby's life is dependent on you… Midwives have the trust of the nation that you can bring our babies into this world unharmed, healthy, and strong. Indigenous people believe so much in our ways, our songs, our medicines, they'll will their babies into existence. Sometimes there's nothing you can do, sometimes things are just meant to to be the way they are meant to be.What kind of learning and teaching have you done?
We went down to Belize, to train with the Mopan Mayan midwives. The Indigenous people there have tons of knowledge, they've each birthed 400, 500 babies. One is coming up in a couple weeks to do workshops on womb massage and a few different things. They also use sweat lodge in a lot of their birthing practices—pre and post-natal. There are things that I know we did here, too. Whenever I go into any other community I always ask: are there traditional midwives practicing? That's something really important because there's so much knowledge out there. That's what I want to do in our own language, is find out what the name is—woman's doctor, woman's healer—whatever it is in our language so we can start to revive that in our nations.I think we'll see a difference by this next generation of babies being born through midwives at home. I already see a difference in my own daughter right here.Follow Sarah on Twitter.