We’re pausing our month-long series commemorating late maternal child health advocates for another important observation: National Native American Heritage Month. It’s our honor to share the work of Indigenous Full-Spectrum Doula Skaniehtiiohstha Kasokeo of A’nowa:ra Owira Doulas serving those on the borderlands of Canada and the U.S. This piece was originally published in 2021.
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In a matrilineal society, ancestral descent is traced through maternal lines. Indigenous Full-Spectrum Doula Skaniehtiiohstha Kasokeo of A’nowa:ra Owira Doulas— serving those on the borderlands of Canada and the U.S.– points out that of the hundreds of Native American tribes across North America, many of them are matrilineal and this framework contributes to the interconnectedness of life.
Skaniehtiiohstha Kasokeo
But because of the devastation of colonization and forced assimilation, many of the birth and infant feeding traditions passed down through clans by mothers have been disturbed. Kasokeo and her colleagues are working to empower Indigenous families through birth, restoring these traditions.
“A lot of things were taken,” Kasokeo says of the effects of colonization. “We all have bits and pieces of that big picture; we’re healing from historical trauma. We can use this time of birth to bring healing to [families].”
She shares that an elder once told her that through the messages we tell our children, we send messages to our future.
“I personally relate that back to the birth experience,”Kasokeo begins.“The messages we send about our bodies, our connection to each other and the strength of women, in my mind happens through breastfeeding. Especially in the first hours after birth, the first messages we relate are about our bodies and the connection to babies’ matrilineal line through breastfeeding.”
Kasokeo emphasizes that this path will look different for every person.
“It doesn’t have to look a certain way,” she says.
“There is a problematic tendency… to generalize within dialogues about Indigenous communities,” Sprenger writes. “It’s critical to remember that ‘Indigenous’ is a very broad term, and that each community has different practices and traditions. Within these communities … each mother and family will have different outlooks, personal histories, and levels of comfort and desires.”
Kasokeo and her colleagues embrace this approach with the overarching theme to give power to women, instilling in them the confidence that their bodies will help their babies to thrive.
The doulas in their group lean on one another, strengthening their collective as support people. Kasokeo talks about how she, in part, pursued doula work in order to become what she needed.
Sign reads: “My Mom, Sisters, Aunties + Grandmas are Sacred” Photo by Dulcey Lima on Unsplash
When Kasokeo became pregnant at 19, she immediately sought out the very limited midwifery care where she was living in Saskatchewan (Treaty 6 Territory). With only 12 midwives in her entire province, she sent in her application as early as possible, but was denied due to the sheer number of parents seeking out midwifery care.
Author Amanda Short details that “Jessica Bailey, President of the Midwives Association of Saskatchewan, said that her team of six at Saskatoon City Hospital turns away anywhere from 40 to 50 percent of people asking for care monthly. Across the province, it’s somewhere from 20 to 50 percent.”
During this time though, she learned about doulas, connected with one in her area and says she “fell in love with everything about it.”
As a survivor of sexual abuse, Kasokeo says it was important to her to know what procedures were going to be done to her perinatally and to be equipped with as much knowledge as possible. Having a doula by her side helped her achieve that.
Despite laboring for over 20 hours and ultimately deciding on pain medication not originally planned, Kasokeo reports having had an orgasmic birth. She says she thought, “Everybody should have this!”
During her second birth, Kasokeo hemorrhaged and was later forced to navigate an unjust healthcare system with retained placental fragments eight weeks postpartum.
Having endured the challenges she found herself in, Kasokeo says she sees herself as well-situated to meet other women where they’re at.
In 2017, she and her colleagues formed A’nowa:ra Owira (Baby Turtle) Doulas serving those in Akwesasne, Canada and surrounding areas.
Akwesasne is a uniquely situated point on the map. Joshua Keating writes in The Nation That Sits Astride the U.S.-Canada Border: “This Mohawk community is home to around 13,000 people and sits astride the world’s longest border (three hours’ drive northeast of Syracuse or two hours’ travel southwest from Montreal), not quite a part of either country, but not quite independent either…The town has three different governments: one elected council recognized by Canada, one by the United States and a traditional government affiliated with the Iroquois Confederacy, of which the Mohawk are one of the six constituent nations, or tribes. All told, including the United States, Canada, the state of New York and the provinces of Quebec and Ontario, there are eight governments with some level of jurisdiction over a territory with an area of less than 40 square miles…”
Kasokeo explains that this means not everyone has access to the same health care systems, so she and her colleagues work to fill in the voids that many families face when in need of maternal child health care.
As the world learns to manage life amidst a pandemic, she and her group are beginning to open up more meetings and social gatherings in hopes of reaching more birthing and lactating individuals.
“I loved the training!” she exclaims. The myth busting and the counseling skills were notable, and she says she appreciated the convenience of being able to simultaneously learn and stay at home with her children.
Kasokeo admits that covering the counseling skills stalled her at times throughout the course; she says she felt guilty reflecting back on past clients and how she might have interacted with them differently and better served them.
“I needed to find the confidence in myself,” she adds. “It was really scary for me, but the course has given me the tools to be confident in my ability to become a lactation care provider. Moving forward, the number one thing will be not making assumptions and asking people to clarify things.”
Kasokeo’s fascination with and passion for maternal child health persist, and she says she would love to network with others. She is particularly interested in learning about how to nurture a homegrown organization with limited funds. You can reach Kasokeo directly at skasokeo@anowaraowiradoulas.org or connect with A’nowa:ra Owira Doulas here and here.
Esther nurses baby Aven. Image from ‘Visualizing change’ a piece about Andrea Mietkiewicz’s, RN, CPM, CLC and filmmaker Nicolle Littrell’s work. Read it at https://www.ourmilkyway.org/visualizing-change/
For more pieces honoring Indigenous experiences, check out:
Dr. Greer Kirshenbaum, PhD posed in an instagram post “What happened at your six week postpartum check up?”
Santana St. Remy and baby skin-to-skin after birth. https://www.ourmilkyway.org/accessing-the-milky-way-scholarship-recipient-inspires-positive-change-in-generations-to-come/
Some responses include:
I felt uncomfortable and like a guinea pig.
I had my check up today and honestly it felt like a tick box exercise…. Like [my GP] was just asking me the questions to just get through it…
Well mine never happened! My [practitioner] decided not to do these anymore! When I called to enquire 13 weeks postpartum I was notified of this and was told that I’m welcome to book an appointment if I think there’s something wrong. It’s ridiculous….
My 6 week health check was shambolic. I was not asked one single question about my mental well-being (after an incredibly traumatic emergency c section) he didn’t even ask about my wound or stitches!? Just asked about contraception and did basic checks on baby…
My postpartum care differed according to care provider. After I gave birth to my first daughter in a hospital, I showed up to my six week check up with my baby. My OB looked at me like, “Why is she here?” and motioned for me to set her in the corner of the bleak exam room. Then, my legs spread, he exclaimed, “Wow! Your cervix! It’s as if you didn’t just have a baby!” It was kind of weird.
After giving birth to my second and third babies at home, our postpartum care came to us. My midwives acknowledged us as the dyad, and even beyond that, included my older child(ren) and partner. They were thorough, interested in my physical, mental and emotional state, and didn’t make any strange comments about my insides.
The postpartum experience in America is many things. Often, it’s despicable.
For one, we offer no paid leave. In fact, one in four women return to work within two weeks of giving birth. The United States Breastfeeding Committee (USBC) is urging our decision-makers to establish national paid family leave. USBC offers a simple action tool to help individuals pressure Congress to pass the FAMILY Act. Find it here.
Without a paid leave policy, it makes it easy to turn the postpartum experience into a money-maker. Concoctions touting increased milk supply and hair growth, programs tailored to bounce-back culture, postpartum hotels, sleep training programs, commercial milk formula, etc. etc. etc. are all marketed wildly.
Care, when and if there is any, is generally siloed. Our system doesn’t consider the whole human or the dyad, so most moms are left chasing around to appointments specifically for baby (ies) and separately for herself. And because too many dyads experience traumatic births, often as the result of the medicalization of birth, that many more appointments pile up (if accessible) as a reactionary remedy.
Fourth trimester care attempts to heal this disconnect and to shift our cultural (mis)conceptions about the postpartum experience, where breastfeeding is recognized as a natural progression of pregnancy and labor, where the mother-baby is cared for as one, and where the postpartum individual is regarded as both delicate and powerful.
On The Breastfeeding Medicine Podcast, Dr. Eglash interviews Dr. Malasa Kahn who provides some practical advice for practitioners on how to integrate 4th trimester care into their efforts.
Check out these individuals and projects previously featured on Our Milky Way working to improve and integrate postpartum care:
MaryAnn Wilbur, M.D., M.P.H., M.H.S. wrote a gut-wrenching piece called Ms. Omega One about the death of a young, Black mother that went completely unpublicized. Ms. Omega One died just two days after giving birth to her daughter. The piece draws attention to important issues such as the coverage of gun violence and disparities in media reports which must be addressed from an anti-racism lens. Ms. Omega One’s story also reminds us why we continue to fight for policies and legislation that support families. It’s because policies and legislation shape the reality of families’ lives. Things like supporting healthy birth options, enabling paid leave, upholding breastfeeding rights, and so on, all support family bonding and mental health. By better supporting families, by honoring the beauty and messiness of motherhood, we might become a society marked by less stress, less divisiveness, less violence and fewer tragedies.
“The Fontana della Spinacorona is a marble representation of the mythological founder of Naples, the winged siren Parthenope. Legend has it that the siren shot her breast milk onto the flames of the volcano Vesuvius to extinguish the fire. The work bears the Latin inscription Dum Vesevi Syrena Incendia Mulcet: ‘while the siren of Vesuvius calms the flames’…I must point out how absolutely METAL that is!!??? BREASTMILK TO EXTINGUISH THE VOLCANIC FLAMES OF VESUVIUS!!!!”
“Think about that for a minute,” Natasha VC urges. “We typically think of a postpartum woman as weak, drained, struggling. Here, the nursing mother with fountains of milk shooting from her ample breasts, puts her on par with the gods of the sky and sea. PURE, RAW POWER, que bella!”
One of my children recently participated in an elective class titled “Adulting”. The students were invited to brainstorm topics they’d like to explore. Students proposed lessons on money management, cooking and my child’s suggestion– infant feeding. Specifically, she suggested they cover breastfeeding because it’s “best” for mom and baby. My daughter shared that after class, she was pulled aside by the teacher who demanded she issue her an apology. By claiming that breastfeeding is best, the teacher, who chose to formula feed her now teenage children, felt that my daughter was deeming her a bad mother. My daughter insisted that this was not the case; she did not consider her teacher a bad mom for formula feeding.
Photo by ray guesc: https://www.pexels.com/photo/mother-sitting-and-breastfeeding-22670489/
Something exploded inside me listening to my daughter’s recollection, a swirl of disappointment, anger, and protectiveness or something like that. I was concerned that a suggestion in a space where brainstorming was encouraged elicited insistence on an apology rather than sparking a dialogue. Could the teacher have shared her feelings without demanding an apology? What kind of messaging about infant feeding was this transmitting to other students in the class? How could the interaction have been more constructive and conducive to the sharing of ideas?
Ultimately, I decided and shared with my daughter that this was simply an excellent example of how infant feeding is such a personal, emotional beast with lifelong effects. Even my reaction to hearing about the interaction dripped in emotion.
Lately, I’ve been seeing a bumper sticker that reads “Feelings aren’t facts” and that’s what I’d like to explore this week. In perinatal care, are feelings facts? How do feelings inform what we accept as fact? What does evidence-based mean? Do facts have the potential to complicate and/or dilute care?
Opportunities for collaboration and respect
A couple of years ago, as a prospective gestational carrier, the fertility clinic that the intended parents and I were working with, required me to take a medication that ultimately caused my TSH to plummet to a dangerously low reading. As a result, our embryo transfer was canceled, the intended parents were left to manage yet another blow on their quest to become parents, and my well-being suffered. To be fair, I did sign my life away at the start of the process, which seemed to translate to the fertility clinic’s free-pass to practice unethically and treat me like a uterus in a science experiment rather than a whole human.
This is a massive oversimplification of what transpired with my care during the year leading up to the canceled transfer, but for purposes of this piece, what you need to know is that when I confronted the fertility doctor, asking her why she chose this plan of action in consideration of all of the other factors, she claimed “evidence” (which she couldn’t actually present to me.) Maybe that’s because there is very little evidence to help inform the experience and health outcomes of gestational carriers. In any case, she explained that their clinic’s evidence base showed that this was the best plan, that she was perplexed that my body reacted to the medication the way it did. This was all despite my plea after plea after plea to please consider a different approach and my many, many warnings that I didn’t feel comfortable with how my care was being managed. It felt like just another example of the billions where women’s voices are dismissed.
I got the impression that the fertility doctor was irritated with my combativeness and questioning. By presenting my own research and my own observations, was I insulting her many years of medical school? Having never actually met me, (she’s located on the West Coast and I’m on the Third Coast and she was never in the clinic when I would fly out for visits) I was insulted and scared that my care was being shoved into their protocols rather than evolving with my lived experience.
This blurb is relatable.
Ultimately after a supportive conversation with my intended parents, we fired the fertility clinic. It was a tragic missed opportunity for collaboration and respect.
As a care provider, it can be endlessly frustrating dealing with the (mis)information that clients/patients might bring with them courtesy of Google searches, influencers, corporate-backed research, etc. Lactation cookies anyone?
Dr. Jen Gunter writes about this on her social media: “A couple of related thoughts.
The first, from the incredible insightful Carl Sagan. I used this quote at the end of my talk at the @festivalofdangerousideas. It think of this a lot when people attack me or get mad when I focus on evidence and the scientific method. Sunk cost fallacy is so human. The second is a very insightful comment from @hankgreen about vibes over facts. It seems to me that in women’s health there is a lot of this…” [Find the quotes she references here and here.]
It can be equally dizzying for parents who are feeling real feelings. In this context, I’d argue that feelings are facts that should be considered, evaluated and explored by care providers. Emotions matter, and they can change the way that we apply what we accept as evidence.
“I worked with a participant today who gave me an insight into today’s clinical practice [for mastitis management]…she made me think about how 21st century breastfeeding has become complicated and technological. The ‘eat, rest and empty breast’ of the 20th century has turned into ‘Ice and pump your brains out’ in the 21st.”
And Lee goes on to reflect that “Dr. Helen Ball’s discovery of the cuddle curl during her observations of dyads sleeping together in her lab has turned into mothers complaining and wondering if they still have to sleep in the C-shape with their 7-month olds, because their hips hurt.”
We’re in a realm where normal is now radical, complicated by an overflow of information and a deficit of good research from certain perspectives, and instincts and feelings are… well, what are they anyway?
Lee offers in an email exchange: “My criticisms of the RCT is that the folks doing the studies have deemed the RCT to be the top of the line. (No bias there…right? LOL.)
Another is that energetic practices, like CST and Reiki and Feng Shui, can’t be studied this way.”
Basically, not everything that counts can be counted.
And she continues, “This study, about the feeling of being observed, has had two results. The first study was that people can sense when they are being observed. One repeat study was that people can’t. What was the difference? The intention of the researcher. The first researcher believed it was possible; the second was a skeptic.” [Papers mentioned can be found here and here.]
In this vein, the individual who runs Thinking is Power posted a video that asks viewers to consider how motivation can have a “sneaky way of driving our reasoning.”
Again, she wonders, “Are RCTs the absolute standard for scientific discovery or the sole source of reliable and valid outcomes? Could it be that our human way of establishing truth has its own limitations?”
Secondly, “Breastfeeding has the weight of biology and survival behind it….been working for mammals for millions of years.”
Like the hosts of the Moms off the Record podcast broadcast: “a sprinkle of evidence, but only when necessary, because let’s be real: biological norms and moms’ intuition do not need to be substantiated by mountains of scientific evidence.” [For a fascinating take on maternal instinct, read Maternal Instinct is a Myth that Men Created.]
The gallery description– “Across generations and geographies, people have informally passed on clandestine forms of knowledge—whether life-sustaining wisdom like foraging and gardening or spiritual beliefs—through whispered words, material objects, images, and, more recently, the Internet.”– fits well here as we consider perinatal practices.
We should also be considering the implications of the term evidence-based, historically and recently in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic, as American Indian and Alaska Native populations have been left out of public health surveillance data, coined Data Genocide. This phenomenon is happening in other communities too. Check out Increasing equity in data science for more on this concept.
Director of the Urban Indian Health Institute and Executive Vice President of the Seattle Indian Health Board Abigail Echo-Hawk, MA (Pawnee) suggests alternatives to the term: community-based, people-informed and practice-based. Another term offered is culturally rigorous science which is for and by the people.
Also consider who gets published, the authors informing the evidence bases. This short piece explores the discrepancies between articles published by authors from the Global North and Global South.
Who do we believe and why?
Photo by Nathan Dumlao on Unsplash
Hidden Brain’s Fact Aren’t Enough episode tells the story of a mom’s decision-making process about vaccinating her baby. The episode details how “sometimes when we believe something, we resist data that can change our minds” and explores “how we rely on the people we trust to shape what we believe, and why emotions can be more powerful than facts.”
In it, neuroscientist Tali Sharot says “…data is not enough. And even if the data is based on very good science, it has to be communicated in a way that would really tap into people’s needs, their desires.”
In another Hidden Brain episode, Where do feelings come from? the host and his guest discuss how “Our feelings turn out to be predictions about the world, not reactions to it. They are ways our brains prepare us for action.” This is an interesting perspective to reflect on as care providers with feelings and as parents with feelings.
There’s no trade-off for compassion
Photo by Проект Мира: https://www.pexels.com/photo/silhouette-of-mother-holding-baby-in-hands-21390015/
In my effort to become a gestational carrier, my care was stripped of compassion for an end-result, and the coldness of my care sent me into a defensive state. Women across all reproductive stages have reported uncompassionate care in the name of evidence or protocols or policies or a desired end-result not defined for themselves. But collaborative, compassionate care is possible.
“Higher level knowledge of how to approach counselling is imperative for allowing our clients to move forward with confidence,” she writes. And really, this approach extends to any speciality.
Sergeant’s presentation “is for anyone who has ever felt frustration at their client’s unwillingness to simply ‘follow the plan’, and for those who feel stuck for the right words during tricky conversations regarding a client’s lactation goals. Uncover ways to create space for vulnerability, to anticipate and confront possible barriers, and to straddle the very complex and ever-moving line of a client’s perception of success or of failure.”
Take the myth “Just one bottle of formula won’t hurt”.
In a Debunking Myths presentation, Smith shares some (of many) issues related to introducing just one bottle of formula:
Every brand of formula has triggered anaphylaxis
Formula permanently changes gut flora and pH
It adds iron which feeds pathogens
It introduces pathogens via fluid and feeding device
“Occasionally there is a need for [formula],” Smith agrees. Alison Stuebe shares an example of a mother more concerned about her milk production than tending to her crying baby inOB/GYN sheds lights on creating breastfeeding culture for instance. But Smith says, “There are exceptions to everything. It doesn’t mean we teach it as a rule.”
Smith argues a few more things:
Give people the facts.
Question everything.
“And listen to mothers,” she adds. “Mothers are always right, even the 14 year-old mother. I’ve been doing this work for [many decades] and mothers have always been right.”
The red bud in my yard is bursting with magenta. The remnants of nighttime thunderstorms, gems of rain dangle from its branches glistening under late morning sun. There’s a lot of anticipation in our backyard woods; a buzzing of green that will soon become too dense to see the railroad tracks that curve through the neighborhood.
When I open the grill on one of these beautiful spring days, I’m confronted by a mother mouse perched in her nest. Her black, beady eyes send me shrieking, foolishly and frantically flailing into my house.
My partner, much less ruffled by the tiny animal, uses the grill utensils to relocate the mother mouse and her nest. Upon removal, he notices that her tiny, pink babies, nearly translucent, are attached to her teats.
“Oh my god!” he exclaims. “Oh my god, they’re nursing! They’re just hanging on!” And then, minus the flailing, proceeds to freak out, because he is so affected by the fact that he has disturbed a nursing mother and her babies. Despite the assault of grill tongs and humans giant relative to their size, the mother and her babies remain together, in an act of survival.
A few days later, at my daughters’ soccer game, my son finds an empty field to kick around his soccer ball. His location and the girls’ game are separated by a small parking lot. I want to finish watching the girls’ game, so my son and I establish a meeting spot. When I go to check on him the first and second time, he is happily occupied, working on what looks like some fancy footwork and big boots. The next time I go to check on him, I scan the landscape, but he is not there. There’s a berm, so I swiftly walk over to see if he’s hidden behind the mound. Still, I don’t see him, so I panic, shouting for him, over and over with no response.
Perhaps I will reveal too much about my character here…I start to conjure up all of the possibilities: he’s been abducted by a stranger, driven away in a van and I’ll never see him again; he’s been swallowed by the marsh on the other side of the road; he’s wandered off into the woods on the perimeter of the field and wolves will eat him; he’s been coerced by someone in the stands and they’ve snuck off with him somewhere.
At this point, my heart is beating in my forehead. Blood drains from my arms and legs and they begin to tingle. It feels like I could be staggering from light-headedness, but I manage to make my way over to recheck our meeting spot; he is not there either. I walk up into the bleachers and ask a familiar face if she has seen my son.
“Yep, he’s right there; I’ve been keeping my eye on him,” she points to the other end of the bleachers… not our meeting spot.
I exhale, thank her quickly, rush to him, embrace him, scold him through trembles. He holds my hand as we make our way to the top of the bleacher seating. He curls his arm around my waist and we sit side-by-side this way watching the reminder of the game together.
My son is no longer a nursling, but my point in sharing these vignettes is that the connection we have to our children, the instinct to be with them, near them, is mammalian, primal. It’s beautiful and powerful.
From the start, our infants’ survival depends on proximity. Of the many things that Karin Cadwell and Kajsa Brimdyr have taught me and that have stuck with me is how babies instinctively crawl to the breast, so even when infant feeding hasn’t been a part of the prenatal conversation, or even if a mom has been on the fence about “committing” to breastfeeding, the baby often makes that initial decision, questing to the breast when given the opportunity in uninterrupted skin-to-skin contact after birth.
“[Babies] are 10,000 years old when they are born,” Nikki Lee has said. “If they’re not next to a heart beat, they are saber-toothed tiger lunch.”
Yet, we find ourselves in a culture that has stripped us of these sacred experiences through marketing and medicalization. We have been acculturated to believe that separation is normal, acculturated to believe that tending to our babies’ basic needs will spoil them, acculturated to believe the only way we can be rested and sane is by separation from our babies, acculturated to believe that we require gadgets to properly raise our children, because somewhere along the line, we started to believe the marketing that nature must be flawed. We fell into the corporate trap, succumbed to their greed, allowed it to dim our instincts.
Now, the language we use refers to the “benefits” of our mammalian behavior: the benefits of physiological birth, the benefits of skin-to-skin contact, the benefits of breastfeeding. Max Ramirez of IBFAN & MOH Panama has said that “Talking about the advantages of breastfeeding versus the risks of not breastfeeding is like talking about the advantages of breathing instead of the consequences of smoking.”
In this Leadership Pittsburgh presentation about “Milk Money,” Todd Wolynn goes as far as to say, “Economics dismantled us as a species.” (He’s referring to formula companies.)
All is not lost. In fact, Camie Jae Golhammer has said of Indigenous traditions, that they’ve gone dormant rather than have completely died off.
Like the boasting red bud in my yard, these sacred moments during our reproductive years will not always lay dormant and there are bright spots to celebrate.
Programs like the Baby-Friendly Hospital Initiative empower families with practices and messaging like: “Every mother has the right to evidence-based information, free from commercial interests to help her decide how to feed her baby and should be equally supported and treated with dignity and respect for her infant feeding decision.”
Global recognition of the importance of midwifery care came to the forefront late last year when midwifery was inscribed on the Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity. This recognition is not only well-deserved by the many, many generations of midwives who have supported and continue to support healthy families, but essential in order to safeguard those in the practice of protecting fundamental human rights and these sacred moments.
Another ray shines as the people at the United States Breastfeeding Committee (USBC) do lots and lots of hard work to advance policies that actually allow people to be with their babies. The organization offers a hub for policy action that makes it incredibly simple for citizens to engage and influence change.
The Hidden Pregnancy Experiment which explores anxieties around surveillance. “As a general rule, these devices don’t lead to better outcomes for the babies they monitor. More often—like social media, which promises connection as a salve for the loneliness created by social media—parenting tech exacerbates, even calls into existence, the parental anxieties that it pledges to soothe.”
“As you focus on clearing your generational trauma, do not forget to claim your generational strengths. Your ancestors gave you more than just wounds.” — Xavier Dagba
Audrey Gentry-Brown, Full Spectrum Birth Sista, Certified Blactation Educator (CBE), Student Midwife, and Medicine Woman in Loudoun County, Va. often found herself asking why?
While present at her sisters’ childbirth experiences, she couldn’t help but question the medical interventions imposed on their bodies. “Why aren’t these doctors allowing their bodies to do what they were designed to do?” she wondered.
Audrey, hailing from a family with maternal origins in the Southern United States and paternal roots in Jamaica, noticed a stark difference in breastfeeding customs. In the U.S., it appeared that nobody from her maternal lineage embraced breastfeeding, while in Jamaica, it was a widespread tradition.The puzzle deepened when she observed the aversion of many Black women to breastfeeding.
Just as she diligently tends to her garden, Audrey embarked on a quest for answers and is now sharing the abundance of knowledge she has cultivated.
In her own words, she is rewriting cultural norms within her community, introducing “Afrofuturist healing modalities” that reconnect to “ancestral magic.”
“I engage in this work to revive and reclaim the traditions that we have abandoned. I advocate for, educate, and guide our women through a system that often neglects our needs. My dream is for us to give birth as our foremothers did, within the comfort of our homes, surrounded by love,” Audrey passionately explains.
She says she sees a glimmer of hope in the growing trend of families choosing to reclaim their traditional birthing practices by opting for out-of-hospital births, which grants them greater control and the ability to curate their birth experience.
Audrey points out a concerning statistic: Black women are more likely to face in-hospital formula introduction (Echols, 2019), along with other marketing tactics targeting them.
“I’m here to tell you that there’s a better way,” she declares.
Moreover, she is dedicated to educating families about traditional practices like babywearing, which encourages breastfeeding and responsive parenting.
In her quest to preserve cultural traditions, Audrey invokes an African proverb: “When an elder dies, a library burns down.” She urges people to reach out to the matriarchs and patriarchs in their families, seeking knowledge of their ancestral customs, and ultimately, to revive, safeguard, and uphold those traditions.
To support Audrey’s mission, you can explore her apothecary or enlist her birthwork services to contribute to her efforts to gather supplies for her future midwifery practice.
