Thank you. Shekoli. Good morning.
I'm speaking to you today from Wasauksing First Nation near Parry Sound.
Thank you, committee members, and thank you, Madam Chair. I am honoured to have the opportunity to have a few minutes to share with you some words about the value of indigenous midwifery to the health and wellness of indigenous communities.
My name is Ellen Blais, and I hold the position of director of indigenous midwifery at the Association of Ontario Midwives. I am a graduate of the midwifery education program at Ryerson University, and I am from the Oneida Nation of the Thames.
I would like to share the name I was given that connects me to my spirit. In the Oneida language my name is Kanika Tsi Tsa, which means Little Flower. I was born through the waters of Many Flowers, who was born through the waters of She Who Carries Flowers, my maternal grandmother. My identity comes from a place of dislocation from the moment I was born, being taken away at birth by child welfare from my culture and my roots. The story of indigenous midwives is inherently related to dislocation as well, up to and including the closure of the Laurentian University midwifery education program.
Sadly, my story is shared by many. Although indigenous people make up about 4%-5% of the population of Canada, in many jurisdictions well above 60% of our population are in the care of the state. Since indigenous midwives are often present at the birth of indigenous babies, they work hard every day to intervene in these destructive practices and are providing excellent clinical care to every indigenous family they are working with. However, there are far too few of us to sustain this kind of work into the future.
I have three recommendations that I will now share, and then provide you with real-life contexts of why these recommendations are relevant.
First, we need a commitment from the federal government to build capacity for indigenous midwifery programs and services by developing a funding strategy to ensure indigenous midwifery is core funded.
Second, we need a commitment from the federal government to provide a mechanism to hire midwives and to provide housing and infrastructure for midwives in first nation and indigenous communities.
Third, we need a commitment from the federal government to provide funding for indigenous midwifery education, so that individual communities can support broader initiatives or create their own midwifery education programs that are relevant to the community, self-governed and community-responsive.
To connect the theme of dislocation, the history speaks for itself. The colonization of indigenous lands and resources also involved the forced removal of our children by the state to be placed in residential schools, now replaced by the current child welfare system. The medicalization of childbirth, along with policies embedded in the Indian Act, pushed indigenous midwives to the side and extinguished their work.
Without these overwhelming forces, midwives would have stood strong to keep birth in our communities. Midwives would have held our babies close and would never have allowed infants and children to be taken out of their mothers' arms. The anti-indigenous racism that is so prevalent in our health systems would not have been allowed to develop exponentially, to the point where indigenous people die from lack of culturally safe care.
In addition, the closure of Laurentian University has left a huge gap in providing midwifery education in the north, and with that, access for midwifery education for indigenous students and the growth of indigenous midwifery in northern communities.
Allow me one moment to ask you a few questions to illustrate my story.
If you have had children, imagine yourself when you were preparing for childbirth, or maybe even preparing for the birth of your grandchild. What were your hopes and dreams for your birth? Where were you going to have your baby? Most likely, you were thinking about your home, your family and your community.
Now replace your thoughts with these. Imagine yourself getting on a plane alone about four weeks before your baby is due. You wave goodbye to your family and hope that they will be okay. You arrive in a small rural or remote community thousands of kilometres away, where you know no one. You live in an unfamiliar place and you wait four lonely weeks until your baby is born. At birth, there is no family, no home and no community. You get back on a plane and you go home all alone with your baby in your arms, with no support.
This is what indigenous people have had to do for generations. It is a harmful and hurtful practice. Where is the sound of the newborn baby's cry? We have only silence. What does that mean for the health and wellness of your community? What has been lost?
In conclusion, access to indigenous midwives is imperative for the health outcomes of indigenous communities. Please consider these recommendations. We are tired of holding this up on our own. We know that to bring back birth is to bring back life. We know how to do this. We are strong, we know what we need, and we are brilliant.
I will conclude with a final ask by sharing a quote from the Women Deliver Indigenous Women's Pre-Conference.
We ask the government of Canada to measure the health and wellness of Indigenous women, girls and gender diverse people as an indicator of the health and wellness of the entire nation.
Thank you. Yaw?’kó
