The authors of this blog are four non-indigenous students at the University of British Columbia. We’ve created this page as a term project for a class on gender and health under the faculty of Gender, Race, Sexuality, and Justice (GRSJ). We feel it is important to emphasize that the views and opinions expressed on this blog are strictly those of the authors. In acknowledging our privilege, we have attempted to highlight the voices of marginalized women and to use this space as a way of analyzing emerging themes from their narratives, whilst consciously trying to avoid speaking for others. We felt it was important to create a resource that contextualizes the contemporary state of Aboriginal midwifery and maternal healthcare in Canada, but by no means is this an extensive coverage of the current research and literature on the topic. Rather, we hope this resource will provide a starting point for people who are not familiar with the topic and that it will inspire others to think more critically about issues surrounding gender, health, and colonialism in Canada.

 

A note on terminology:

 

Throughout the blog we have referred to the experiences of individuals who access healthcare for pregnancies as women/woman and mothers. Furthermore, in respect of the author’s research that we’ve drawn from, we have each used the same terms that the researchers have used in their respective articles. Therefore, we use a variety of terminology to identify Aboriginal peoples including First Nations, Inuit, and Indigenous persons of Canada. We acknowledge that these terms have distinct meanings and reflect a diversity of locations and experiences. Furthermore we acknowledge that categories of gender and ethnicity are externally imposed colonial ideas that may not be culturally appropriate for the identities of all indigenous peoples, however for ease of readership we have maintained language used in the dominant discourse.