Sacred beginnings: Reclaiming birth in the North

In Indigenous communities, the birth of a child is more than a medical event; it’s a sacred time for ceremonies that connect people to their culture and place. Yet for decades, expectant mothers from remote communities across Canada’s North have been required to leave their homes to give birth in distant medical facilities.

“The policy was put in place by the federal government with the intention of reducing infant mortality rates,” says Hennessey Chartier Ford, who planned her graduate research on the practice, known as birth evacuation, with support from WCHRI.

“But recent studies have shown that Indigenous women with low-risk pregnancies have better outcomes when birthing services are provided in their communities.”

In 2023, when she was a PhD student at the University of Alberta, Chartier Ford received a Patient and Community Engagement Training (PaCET) award to plan research into community-informed alternatives to birth evacuation, which is also common in other polar regions, including Greenland, Alaska and Norway. She could see that health-care systems have often been “designed without input from the Indigenous Peoples they serve, which had resulted in ineffective health services and policies.”

WCHRI issues at least four PaCET awards a year through its Graduate Studentship program to train candidates in participatory research, which engages patients, clinicians, community groups, government and non-government organizations as partners.

During her project, Chartier Ford lived in Yellowknife, NWT, and worked at the Institute for Circumpolar Health Research with Inuk Elder Rassi Nashalik and Inuk midwife Shelley O'Gorman. She also attended a conference in Denmark that brought together health researchers, Indigenous Elders and midwives from global polar regions to discuss maternal health issues.

She participated in a sharing circle where she learned that giving birth away from home carries cultural and emotional risks for community members, who view health and wellness through a holistic, culture-based lens. The importance of community engagement in research that involves maternal child health services in the Arctic became even clearer.

“I am proud to engage in research that recognizes the value of Indigenous knowledge and lived experiences and which positions community members as experts on their own health. I felt very honoured to get to learn from local Elders and other knowledge holders.”

Though Chartier Ford has since left her PhD program to study medicine at the University of Calgary, where she plans to specialize in obstetrics and gynecology, she remains committed to her research.

“I want to implement what I learned into my own medical practice,” she says. “I loved living in the North and I want to continue the research and do more work in partnership with the community.”