Natasha Bowman is a Navajo doula and student midwife. Her work centers around revitalizing traditional birthing through practices that have been overshadowed by Western medicine.
In traditional spaces, families are often there, supporting the mother through labor and birth. One of Bowman’s clients was the first woman in her family to have a home birth since her great-great-grandmother. The client was in the company of other women in her family and for the first time — her father.
Before the woman’s home birth, her father wasn’t allowed to be present for the births of his own children. His wife would labor at the hospital while he was at home and then return with their babies.
It was very different while his daughter was in labor. He was invited into the space and able to console her, rubbing her head and speaking to her as she moaned through contractions.
He sat in the living room during the active birth and told Bowman — through tears — that he wished he would have been there for the births of his children. He had no idea what his wife was going through until he saw his daughter go through it.
“Within the community, bringing in the aunts, the grandmas, the sisters, the cousins, bringing them all within that space, working as a community together. It's beautiful to see everyone come together at a birth with the women around,” Bowman said.
Bowman explained that traditional births can often involve ceremonies, songs, holistic herbs, tinctures and the use of Native language alongside including family members.
Indigenous medicinal practices, alongside cultural and religious ceremonies, were considerably restricted under the 1883 Code of Indian Offenses, allowing authorities to withhold food, impose extra labor or jail people for up to 10 days for seeking or providing medicine or traditional healing.
Until the Congress passed the American Indian Religious Freedom Act in 1978, Native communities were largely forced to seek care within Western health systems.
“We see that we had our traditional birthing practices long ago. It was taken from us when hospitals came into our communities, and then our traditional birth ways were taken from us. They started telling us it was unsafe,” Bowman said.
Last year, the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services approved a Section 1115 waiver, allowing Medicaid to cover traditional healing. On Oct. 1, Arizona Health Care Cost Containment System, AHCCCS, Arizona’s Medicaid agency, began reimbursing them, making Arizona one of the first states to do so. The initiative “aims to offer culturally appropriate options for eligible members.”
For tribal communities, this progress has been decades in the making.
“I'm really happy that, after over a decade, or to this point, that the advocates in our state didn't give up and that we just kept moving it forward because we really understood the value of it,” said Kim Russell, the policy advisor at Sage Memorial Hospital on the Navajo Nation.
Hanley Manygoats is a traditional medicine practitioner (Hatalii) on the Navajo Nation. He grew up around traditional healing before becoming a practitioner himself. Lately, Manygoats went from seeing one person a month to three or four a week.
“It's all part about healing, spiritual healing. It's all about this being the one with nature, mother earth, father sky,” Manygoats said. “So we have all these stories that go with our traditional healing, our songs, our prayers. So it all starts with the origin stories.”
For many, he said, it’s the first time in decades they’ve been able to experience these healing ceremonies.
“When I do prayers for the elders, they get emotional because they haven't heard prayers like this in a long time. The last time they had a prayer done was when their grandparents or their fathers and mothers were around. Now they're gone,” he said.
Though AHCCCS coverage has allowed more people to seek traditional healthcare, Manygoats said the coverage is limited.
“It only covers minor ceremonies, not extensive, not the one day, three days. We have ceremonies that go up to nine days,” he said.
Janeen Phillips is a doctoral candidate for health administration. She comes from a line of healers in her family and works with Manygoats as an assistant for the Office of Cultural and Language Resources at the Tuba City Regional Health Care Corporation.
Phillips said AHCCCS has helped with preserving traditional practices so they will be passed down to future generations. She said the affordability will help more Native Americans to access traditional care.
Phillips also emphasized the importance of differentiating a Western medical provider and a traditional healer.
“They absorb that energy from a person who they're trying to help, versus a provider where it's just kind of more of an external view of what's happening to them and a prescription,” she said.
Looking forward, Russell also hopes the Medicaid reimbursements will continue to help tribal communities access traditional medicine and continue into younger generations.
"I kind of see it maybe expanding, being more exposed to our youth, who maybe have not had as much exposure," Russell said.
This article first appeared on Cronkite News and is republished under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.
