Carrying water: indigenous women reclaiming birthing sovereignty along the Red River

Abstract

Despite the increased public visibility of the issue of violence against Indigenous women in Canada, it is less widely acknowledged that violence is often also located in their experiences of pregnancy and childbirth. One of the most pernicious forms this violence takes is the practice of newborn infants being apprehended from their mothers/birthing parents by social workers in the hours or days after their birth, a crisis of settler colonial reproductive violence that disproportionately targets Indigenous families. This dissertation examines the recent emergence of Indigenous doula training initiatives in Winnipeg, Manitoba, which is an epicenter of both newborn apprehensions and the crisis of missing and murdered Indigenous women, girls, and two-spirit people (MMIWG2S). These doula programs have been training Indigenous women to provide companionship and advocacy support for pregnant, birthing, and postpartum Indigenous women and birthing people since 2017. I specifically address how this resurgence of Indigenous birthing care enacts an embodied paradigm of sovereignty that confronts the related crises of newborn apprehensions and MMIWG2S through the reclamation of relationality across genealogical, embodied, and ontological realms. Drawing on over 50 interviews and multiple periods of ethnographic research in Winnipeg over the course of seven years, as well as additional interviews and events conducted virtually via Zoom during the pandemic and with Indigenous doulas based in Vancouver, this project is animated by the narratives of Indigenous doulas, midwives, MMIWG2S advocates, artists, and water walkers to demonstrate the ways that the reclamation of birth is intertwined with a concern for the dead as well as the living, and with the protection of both women/birthing people and bodies of water as life-givers. These connections are explored through the Anishinaabe concept of Indigenous women as “water carriers,” a term that indicates a special bond between women and water as creators and nurturers of new life. This project examines various different ways that Indigenous women conceptualize and enact the meaning of “carrying water” in Winnipeg. Moreover, it asks: How does the understanding of birth as embedded in a wider set of relationships work not only to heal and nurture human and more-than-human existence, but also to reclaim Indigenous ontologies, or philosophies of being, that assert those relations? This dissertation advances the analytic of “water carrying” to contribute a distinct understanding of how Indigenous women in Winnipeg are responding to ongoing settler colonial reproductive violence through the enactment of a relational birthing sovereignty.