Tansi Nîtôtemtik,
Monique Aura, "Dreaming of Motherhood". Image retrieved from @monique.aura.
This week the blog explores the concept of child development and the impacts of child welfare on the family, communities, and mothering. Today’s post focuses on Indigenous motherhood, the mother’s role in fostering Indigeneity, and the impacts colonial processes such as the child welfare system have had on mothering in the Indigenous context. That being said, this post does not propose to define Indigenous mothering; it is respectfully recognized there are a multiplicity of experiences, worldviews, and backgrounds that make defining the concept difficult.[1] With that in mind, today’s post seeks to highlight unifying themes across the experience of Indigenous mothering in a way that demonstrates and affirms the importance of Indigenous women in their role as mothers, grandmothers, sisters, aunts and daughters as a source of strength, resiliency, and transformative power in healthy child development.[2]
De-structuring Mothering
Traditionally, Indigenous women held positions of esteem in their communities and were valued for their role as life-givers and mothers.[3] The power to bring life into the world was regarded as sacred and some First Nations recognized women as the centre of the Nation. Mothering roles were central to many women’s social positions within their communities and women who “successfully raised their families and provided care and nurturing to the needy became influential as family spokespersons”.[4] Mothers also played a key role in transmitting what some have termed the foundations of Indigeneity including: “values that privilege the interrelationships among the spiritual, the natural and the self; a sacred orientation to place and space; a fluidity of knowledge exchange between past, present, and future; and an honouring of language and orality as an important means of knowledge transmission.”[5] It is no surprise that in the process of assimilation, the colonial agenda heavily implicated Indigenous women’s bodies and the family: “the [Aboriginal] family emerged as a material force in the [colonial] destruction of kinship societies and their subordination, socially and economically, to the colonial and imperial nations”.[6] As has been discussed in numerous posts in recent weeks, the disruption in the connection to the community has significant impacts on the health and well-being of the children and youth in care and when they age out of care as adults. As a result, Indigenous families operate under what Greenwood and de Leeuw have termed a “triple jeopardy” in Canada:
Prevailing discourses (both historically and contemporarily) in Canada have; 1) constructed Indigenous peoples as deficient and (consequently) in want of Euro-Canadian intervention; 2) maligned Indigenous peoples through systematic discursive and institutional interventions resulting in socio-cultural and economic marginalization; and 3) conflated poverty issues with neglectful parenting practices and thus opened Aboriginal families to the full spectrum of Canadian child welfare policies.[7]
Supporting Mothering
Indigenous mothering is still undermined in varying degrees by a continued system that results in a lack of security through acts of “violence, humiliation, and psychological abuse”.[8] Therefore a key aspect in working towards reconciliation in the area of child welfare means supporting mothering. Mothering needs to be supported at all stages, beginning with increased access to pre-natal care, an area that many Indigenous women experience problems in accessing.[9] Following birth, the mother/child dyad needs to be supported by the family and community.[10] When it comes to situations where child apprehension is deemed necessary, the importance of building cultural capacity through a focus on protecting the transmission of Indigenous knowledges and ways of being which has been shown to lead to increased “socio-cultural resiliency and decreased social risk factors”[11] need to be fostered and emphasized. Early childhood development and education programs need to be facilitated which promote Indigeneity and which support and draw upon Indigenous women and mothers.[12]
In cases where state intervention is inevitable, the values and means of fostering Indigeneity and developing individuals in the Indigenous community, like kinship care, need to be utilized. Carriere and Richardson argue that kinship care is a way for the child protection industry to contribute to increasing the health and development of communities, a move that could interrupt the cycle of children being removed from their families and communities in the future.[13] Social workers should facilitate kinship care for Indigenous children by providing them with ways to remain linked to their culture and communities and in turn to preserve intact their own identities.[14]
Despite the diversity of experiences in Indigenous mothering, a unifying theme is a “shared reality of being different from the dominant culture”, which some mothers have recognized as having a significant impact on their ability to mother “as [they] see fit, according to [their] own values, and traditions.”[15] For some, this has resulted in Indigenous mothering becoming a deliberate act of resistance with the purpose of destroying colonialism.[16]
Despite the devastating impacts of past and current processes of colonialism, Indigenous women and mothers have played and continue to play a vital role in fostering the resiliency and wellness of their families and communities. Indigenous women and mothers are the source of a resurgence in traditional and contemporary teachings and practices around mothering and child rearing.[17] It seems clear that one important step towards reconciliation means supporting early childhood education and programming that supports and fosters Indigeneity in Indigenous mothers.[18]
Yours Truly,
Team ReconciliAction YEG
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[1] National Collaborating Centre for Indigenous Health, The Sacred Space of Womanhood: Mothering Across the Generations (Prince George: National Collaborating Centre for Indigenous Health, 2013) online (pdf): <www.ccnsa-nccah.ca/docs/health/RPT-SacredSpaceWomanhood-Bckgrnd-EN.pdf> [perma.cc/65WW-EP2L] at 3.
[2] Ibid at 2.
[3] Ibid at 3.
[4] Jo-Anne Fiske, “Carrier Women and the Politics of Mothering” in Gillian Laura Creese & Veronica Strong-Boag (eds) British Columbia Reconsidered: Essays on Women (Vancouver: Press Gang Publishers, 1992) 198 at 202.
[5] Margo Greenwood & Sarah de Leeuw, “Fostering Indigeneity: The Role of Aboriginal Mothers and Aboriginal Early Child Care in Responses to Colonial Foster-Care Interventions” in Jeannette Corbiere Lavell & Dawn Memee Lavell-Harvard (eds) Until Our Hearts Are On the Ground: Aboriginal Mothering, Oppression, Resistance and Rebirth (Toronto: Demeter Press, 2006) 173 at 178.
[6] Julia Emberley, “Genealogies of Difference: Fundamentalisms, Families, and Fantasies”. Paper presented at TransCanada – Literature, Institutions, and Citizenship: An Interdisciplinary Conference. Vancouver, BC, June 23-26, 2005, as cited in Greenwood & de Leeuw, supra note 5 at 174.
[7] Ibid at 176.
[8] Jeannine Carriere and Cathy Richardson, “From Longing to Belonging: Attachment Theory, Connectedness, and Indigenous Children in Canada” in Sharon McKay, Don Fuchs, & Ivan Brown (eds) Passion for Action in Child and Family Services: Voices from the Prairies (Regina: Canadian Plains Research Center, 2009) 49 at 60.
[9] Supra note 1 at 7.
[10] Supra note 8 at 59-60.
[11] Supra note 5 at 179.
[12] Ibid.
[13] Supra note 8 at 56-57.
[14] Ibid at 56.
[15] Jeannette Corbiere Lavell & Dawn Memee Lavell-Harvard, “Thunder Spirits: Reclaiming the Power of our Grandmothers” in Jeannette Corbiere Lavell & Dawn Memee Lavell-Harvard (eds) Until Our Hearts Are On the Ground: Aboriginal Mothering, Oppression, Resistance and Rebirth (Toronto: Demeter Press, 2006) 1 at 2.
[16] See Andrea Landry, “The Realities of Indigenous Motherhood” (09 October 2018), online (blog): Indigenous Motherhood <indigenousmotherhood.wordpress.com/2018/10/09/the-realities-of-indigenous-motherhood/> [perma.cc/4T6Z-YF75].
[17] Supra note 1 at 2.
[18] Supra note 5 at 179.
