Innu Midwifery Education
INNU PATHWAYS TO MIDWIFERY EDUCATION
The Innu Midwifery Program (IMP) recruits and trains local Innu students from Sheshatshiu and Natuashish to become registered midwives in their communities. The community-based curriculum blends global midwifery standards with traditional Innu knowledge, using hands-on training via birthing simulators and mentorship under interdisciplinary teams. Most importantly, students gain hands-on skills through apprenticeship with our team of registered locum midwives who provide full-scope midwifery care within the community.
The hands-on learning of the students in the IMP is informed by the National Council of Indigenous Midwives' (NCIM) competencies framework, and tailored to meet the unique cultural values and needs of the Innu community. Community-based learning is supported by Gisela Becker RM, a registered midwife with 40 years of clinical experience working in Canada's North, while theoretical learning is acquired through university-level instruction by the IMP's clinical midwife instructor and professor, Andrea Robertson RM MHSc.
The IMP apprenticeship model combines on-the-job training and classroom time ensuring students are involved in a wide range of activities. Importantly, the IMP students are full-time salaried employees of the Innu Round Table Secretariat, with benefits, and annual leave. This model supports the students to learn on-the-job as they move into the role of community midwives.
AN Experiential Step-Wise Learning Approach
The model of the IMP is created to honour Innu ontologies (life philosophies) and pedagogies (ways of learning) which view education and health as inseparable from our relationship to Land, kinship, and community. The extraction of Innu people from their communities and Lands for birth and birthworker education destabilizes kinship systems and reproduces cycles of ill-health through the same intergenerational and social harms that we are aiming to remedy through the revitalization of Innu midwifery.
The IMP is designed to allow our students to continue to participate meaningfully in their communities and kinship systems while building their capacity as community health leaders and care providers through a sustainable and step-wise learning model.
The IMP uses an individually-paced and strengths-based learning approach. Teaching is done in a hands-on and culturally specific environment. A supportive learning and practice model is of paramount importance to the IMP where students attend approximately 12 hours of commuity-based classroom learning per week.
Educational laddering is employed where students graduate after their first year as Innu birth workers, after two years with mid-program graduation, after three years as graduate midwives, and finally, as a registered midwife after four to five years.
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the IMPORTANCE OF Community-Based Education Pathways
Before colonization, Indigenous peoples across Turtle Island gave birth with the help of midwives who were respected members of their communities. The term for a midwife was as diverse as the Indigenous landscapes and languages across Turtle Island. Indigenous midwives were traditional knowledge keepers and carried generations of embodied expertise through mentorship, apprenticeship, and connection to the Land and community.
Indigenous midwives across Turtle Island helped settler families to birth the country we now call Canada, but Indigenous midwifery was subsequently outlawed and much of our traditional midwifery knowledge was taken or lost and replaced with settler midwifery systems. Midwifery education pathways have also shifted out of community into Canadian universities where Indigenous peoples face numerous barriers to accessing midwifery education and practice.
The term midwife has since become a legally protected title in Canadian provinces that regulate midwifery, which means that only an individual who has completed a university-based midwifery degree program and passed the Canadian Midwifery Registration Exam (CMRE) can legally claim the title of Indigenous midwife in Canada. The regulation and professionalization of midwifery in Canada helps ensure the safety of the public accessing midwifery care, however, it has greatly restricted those who can access midwifery education and care.
The Innu midwifery program recognizes that the barriers to accessing midwifery education and restoring community-based birthing systems are rooted in colonialism and systemic racism, not Indigeneity.
Many Indigenous communities, including the Innu Nation, are making strides towards the restoration and implementation of community-based training programs to overcome systemic barriers to university-based midwifery education and reclaim this culturally important role. The IMP views community-based midwifery education as a vital step towards addressing perinatal health disparities and rebuilding resilient community-based health systems.
Supporting Meaningful Steps towards Reconciliation
We affirm that Innu perinatal health disparities and barriers to midwifery education are rooted in colonialism, and systemic racism, not Indigeneity.
The Innu midwifery education pathway represents an important step towards meaningful reconciliation and restorative justice by addressing numerous Calls to Action (7, 10.iii, 11, 18, 19, 22, 23) as outlined by the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada, and Calls to Justice (3.2, 4.8, 7.1, 7.2, 7.4, 7.6, 7.7, 7.8 & 12.2) as outlined by The National Inquiry into Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls.
