Building a Movement: Remembering and Reclaiming Indigenous Birthing Roles
Helena Jacobs (Koyukon Athabascan) got a text one night: “There was a very young mom who was alone, getting ready to have her first baby, and was asking for help.” This was Jacobs’ first time attending a birth for someone with whom she had no prior relationship, so she was scared. “The moment I walked into the room and we introduced ourselves, all that fear just melted away,” Jacobs admitted. “Simply having someone show up to be kind, caring, and supportive, saying, ‘I’m just here for you; I’m here to hold space for you and be whatever you need me to be in this moment, and I will adapt as your needs adapt, and I’m not going to leave until you’re ready for me to leave.’ It was such a wonderful blessing.”
Jacobs gets emotional when remembering this moment. “It’s such an honor to be invited into such a sacred space and to build that immediate sisterhood or kinship around such a transformation,” Jacobs says. “After that, I thought, Yeah, I can do this, and I want to do it more, and I’m really committed to this work, and our families are hungry for this, needing it and wanting it.”
Jacobs, originally from the Native Village of Ruby (230 miles west of Fairbanks), and a network of volunteers were in the early stages of founding the Alaska Native Birthworkers Community (ANBC). The organization works to reclaim Indigenous birth practices and support families from preconception through postpartum with culturally matched care. It began as a group text thread of women who, although balancing full-time jobs, family, and community duties, would show up to be available to pregnant women from rural Alaska villages who requested care from the community while waiting out their last month of pregnancy, all by themselves, at the tribal hospital in Anchorage.
Alaska has a healthcare system that requires pregnant women living in villages to be evacuated mandatorily at 36 weeks of gestation, or sometimes earlier. They leave their villages and travel to a community hub like Bethel, which serves the 57 villages that surround it. “So, anyone pregnant in those villages has to leave their village and go to Bethel and wait to have their baby,” Jacobs explains. “If they’re considered high-risk for any reason—which sometimes can be determined simply because it’s their first baby and their pelvis hasn’t been proven—they bypass their regional hospital and come all the way to Anchorage.” They have to wait in the hospital, inpatient housing, or a hotel. If they are fortunate, they may be able to stay with relatives or friends. Because the cost of traveling with a companion is not covered, most women just wait alone, sometimes for a month or longer, to have their babies. “It can be very isolating, lonely, and frightening. Some villagers have never been to the city or are unfamiliar with it and find it disorienting.”
Reclaiming traditional pregnancy and birthing knowledge.
As word got out, the requests from these young mothers grew. After a few years, they knew they couldn’t sustain their services with their “scrappy little crew”. They needed more birthworkers and a larger network. Alaska Native Birthworkers Community hosted their first full-spectrum Indigenous Doula training in 2021. “It was incredible; so many people turned out from all over the state. They had never been to anything like this before and wanted to know more. They wanted to remember and recognize these roles, alongside us, that our communities have held for millennia. This was traditional household knowledge: to know how to be pregnant, how to give birth, and how to care for people who are pregnant, giving birth, or have recently given birth. We had these roles and this community-based knowledge that belonged to us. It was extracted and removed. We were told that we had to leave our communities and go to hospitals and be treated by Western medicine, and that our traditional methods weren’t valid anymore and that our knowledge wasn’t accredited.” As a result, the group began certifying themselves—remembering—and building a network of people to serve Alaska Native families. Today, the group is building a movement, growing Indigenous Birthworkers capacity in Alaska, advocating for systems change, providing pregnancy support events, and showing up at births.
“We envision sovereignty for Alaska Native people from our first breaths on Earth, through the reclamation of our power during rites of passage that are rooted in ancestral knowledge, and each birthing person being surrounded by their community in connection to their sacred lands and waters.” -Alaska Native Birthworker Community
The healing power of this work
“We are our ancestors. When we can heal ourselves, we also heal our ancestors, our grandmothers, our grandfathers, and our children. When we heal ourselves, we heal Mother Earth.” These teaching words from the late Grandma Rita Pitka Blumenstein (Yup’ik) are shared often in this work. She was Alaska’s first certified traditional doctor as well a revered teacher and matriarch.
“There is so much healing power when we do this work with our families,” Jacobs says, “the care you can provide during pregnancy and immediately after childbirth, can really have lifelong health impacts and outcomes for that family and for that child.” There is a lot of data to back up why this work is so important, such as research that shows how having a continuous supportive presence from a trained doula or even just someone from your community can really improve the outcomes of that birth, with people reporting feeling supported and positive about their birth, with reduced labor times and the need for interventions, and C sections. “It’s also significant because this is how our communities worked and what our societal structures provided for millennia as a way of caring for people.”
Growing a Network of Indigenous Birthworkers – and a Movement.
The group dreams of supporting a large and growing network of birthworkers across the state. “When somebody calls us and says, ‘I’m in Ketchikan (or Barrow or Bethel) and I really want a helper to be with me during my pregnancy’, we would know exactly who to call and can say, ‘I’m going to connect you with this person locally and they can walk alongside you in this journey.’
As the movement grows, Jacobs regularly meets people who have a heart for service and want to do this work but don’t feel they have the necessary qualifications, such as a certificate or doula training, so they don’t believe they are valid or that they can do this type of work. “This is a movement to reclaim our sacred roles,” she says to them. “This is a movement about showing up for what we know how to do as Aunties and Sisters. It’s our families that teach and guide us on how they best need to be served. It’s about simply stepping into it and being open to learning and knowing how to offer nonjudgmental care and know how to be neutral and support other people’s decision-making while remaining loving and kind. I’ve been to births when I didn’t have to do anything but sit beside them. I always show up with my whole bag of tricks and all the things that some folks don’t need. They only need a witness and someone else’s energy to comfort them.”
Alaska Native Birthworkers Community is a grassroots organization based in Degeyaqaq, also known as Anchorage, of volunteer Alaska Native reproductive justice advocates, full-circle birth helpers (doulas), childbirth educators, breastfeeding counselors, healers, caregivers, public health researchers, scholars, parents, aunties, and a midwife. ANBC works to reclaim Indigenous birth practices and supports families from preconception through postpartum with culturally matched care. While direct services for Indigenous families preparing for and engaging in the ceremony of birth are an important component of what ANBC does, building capacity within the community is also essential to continuing this work. For more information, go to https://www.nativebirthworkers.org/
Na’ah Illahee Fund is an Indigenous women-led organization dedicated to the ongoing regeneration of Indigenous communities. Serving communities in the Northwest corner of Turtle Island from the Arctic to the Rockies. https://www.naahillahee.org/