Mortified about menstruation? Some Indigenous youth learn to celebrate it instead

The spring equinox has just passed, but Cutcha Risling Baldy's summer schedule is already looking jam-packed, as youth from her Hupa community prepare to celebrate something their tween peers may be apprehensive about or even avoid discussing: their first period.

Risling Baldy has helped foster the resurgence of the Hupa Flower Dance, a ceremony honouring the start of menstruation. Her daughter, who took part a few years ago, belongs to a new generation openly talking about and thinking of menstruation in a positive light. 

Revived by a group of Hupa women, the Flower Dance is a rite of passage that celebrates, guides and empowers young menstruators as they begin their transition into adulthood. 

Not celebrated openly for more than 100 years, "now, it's such a part of our existence and our lives we couldn't imagine a world without it," the associate professor of Native American studies at California State Polytechnic University Humboldt in Arcata, Calif., told Unreserved.

It's just one effort among many that Indigenous women are leading to shift the narrative about menstruation. They're doing away with shame and stigma in favour of honouring and supporting a young person's first period as an important and sacred transition in their life.

"When you dance for somebody, when you sing for them, when you stop the world for five or seven or 10 days for them, they cannot grow up in a world thinking that they are nothing," said Risling Baldy, who is Hupa, Karuk, and Yurok and enrolled in the Hoopa Valley Tribe.

"They know that the whole world will stop to celebrate them and the whole world will stop to show them how important they are — and then they will turn around and do that for the next girl and the next."

Once openly practised, the Hupa Flower Dance was a ceremony pushed underground during the mid-19th century Gold Rush era, when Indigenous people were targeted with acts of violence by settlers arriving in northern California, said Risling Baldy, who documented the ceremony's return in her book We Are Dancing For You. 

"It became very dangerous for us to do this dance because it was celebrating a young woman. It was bringing women together…. It was demonstrating how important they are politically and socially."

Risling Baldy counts herself among those who, in her youth, had internalized Western patriarchal perspectives about women — including a negative perception about menstrual periods as dirty, something to be hidden or feel ashamed about — in the absence of ceremonies like the Flower Dance.

Now, however, not only are young Flower Dance participants rejecting those negative narratives, its revival is normalizing open discussion about menstruation, including among boys, men and elders of the community, Risling Baldy said. 

That breaking down of barriers, she says, can eventually make it easier for young women to open up about any challenges or concerns in their future.

Lenaape and Anishinaabe Elder Tracey Whiteye has also seen the positive impact of more people learning traditional teachings that celebrate menstruation — known as moon time — through her role as a cultural educator from the Delaware Nation of the Thames in Ontario municipality Chatham-Kent.

When a young person starts their first menstrual cycle, it kicks off a year ("13 moons") of ceremonies and learning from aunties, grandmas and others. "It's like we celebrate a 'Welcome to Womanhood' year," she said.