Center for Indigenous Midwifery

08/18/2026

08/14/2026

It’s Indigenous Milk Medicine Week!

This year’s theme:
🔥 We Keep the Fires Lit: Rising Through Milk Medicine 🔥
“Fire represents the responsibility to tend what sustains life - our knowledge, families, and our future generations. Even amid hardship and shifting challenges, Indigenous communities endure through brilliance, adaptation, and relationship. First foods carry memory and medicine forward, nourishing not only our bodies and our babies, but the continuity of our communities.” - Indigenous Milk Medicine Collective (IMMC)

From August 8 to 14, IMMC hosts Indigenous Milk Medicine Week that is dedicated to promoting equity in Native first food experiences.

Our very own Elizabeth Montez (Flower Moon Families), IBCLC & Open Arms’ Lactation Support Program Clinical Lead & Community Educator, created this beautiful art piece, illustrating Native first food. ✨

08/14/2026

New research from the March of Dimes says more than half of U.S. counties have no labor and delivery hospitals. One Black midwife tries to make a difference for moms in Alabama.

08/13/2026

08/11/2026

08/08/2026

August 9th is International Day of the World's Indigenous Peoples, with this year's theme: "Honouring Indigenous Midwives: Safeguarding Life and Well-being."

Midwifery has long been a traditional birthing practice among Indigenous Peoples, holding an important role within Métis and many other Indigenous communities around the world. Indigenous midwives provide culturally safe care rooted in community values, traditions, and ways of knowing while supporting families through pregnancy, birth, and into parenthood.

Traditionally, birth was often a community affair, with aunties, grandmothers, and community members supporting the mother and child through labour and the postpartum recovery. Pregnancy and birth were therefore central to Métis cultural teachings and understood as natural parts of the life cycle.

Midwives were once considered the cornerstone of Indigenous communities and guardians of ancestral knowledge about caring for pregnant women, their babies, and their families.

Today, we celebrate the resurgence of Indigenous midwives within our communities. Indigenous Midwives are the Knowledge Holders and the Guardians of Well-being.

Source: With Child, Ehawawisit - Experiences and Perspectives of Métis Women on Pregnancy, Birth and Motherhood

08/08/2026

Indigenous midwifery supports well-being, strengthens cultural identity, promotes trust and care, and helps sustain Indigenous Peoples’ ways of life.

When Indigenous knowledge systems are respected and supported, it also supports living according to their own priorities, cultures and traditions.

This will discuss how to advance a rights-based and evidence-informed dialogue on Indigenous midwifery.

👉Find out more about the Day here: https://social.desa.un.org/issues/indigenous-peoples/events/IDWIP2026