'A sacred experience': Indigenous midwives revive birthing traditions to deliver babies at home

On the shore of Lake Kehiwin, four mothers cradled their babies' placentas in a ceremony held along a newly cleared trail in the bush of the Kehewin Cree Nation in northeast Alberta.

Each baby is swaddled in a different coloured fabric and tied with ribbon as part of an inaugural birth camp, a week-long event to share teachings about traditional birthing and family customs. 

In a thicket of trees next to the mothers, a group of men dug a hole for placentas to be placed on top of sage and buried with an offering of tobacco. 

"When we do that, the kid is grounded and is with Mother Earth," Elder Doreen Moosepayo said.

The children were delivered at the hospital in the town of Bonnyville, Alta., 20 kilometres northeast. But the goal is that future generations can enter the world on the Cree nation. 

The initiative is part of a federal pilot to increase the number of Indigenous midwives in reserve communities, including Kehewin, Opaskwayak Cree Nation in Manitoba, and Sturgeon Lake First Nation in Saskatchewan. 

Trainees study the practices of past generations of Indigenous midwives along with medical training.

Four women are training to become midwives in Kehewin, and the First Nation recently received $500,000 in capital funding to build a midwifery birthing centre to foster future opportunities.

It will take up to four years for trainees in Kehewin to complete their studies, but the hope is that this birth camp will be one of many.

Jodi Gadwa-Cardinal, doula and midwife in-training, entered the program to keep traditions alive within her family.

When Gadwa-Cardinal's niece Maelan Tsatoke had a baby, the family kept Tsatoke labouring at home for as long as possible. When the baby was born at the hospital, they sang the family's welcoming song to him in Cree.

"This is why I'm in this Indigenous midwifery program because I want the whole experience," she said, adding the ultimate goal is for the women to have their babies born in their communities.

"For them to have [the] baby at home in Kehewin where they're from ... It's such a sacred experience for mom and baby," Gadwa-Cardinal said.

"Baby hears the language from the kokums [or grandmothers] right away so that he knows this is where he belongs, this is your family, and this is who you are."