Nurturing Indigenous Maternal-Child Wellness: Urban Indigenous Midwifery, Birth Workers, and Families’ Experiences in Calgary, Alberta
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Colonialism, sexism, and discrimination continue to affect Indigenous maternal-child health outcomes, leading to higher rates of adverse health outcomes and experiences, violence against women, socioeconomic barriers, and anti-Indigenous bias. Existing maternal health gaps between Indigenous and non-Indigenous populations, alongside increasing Indigenous population growth rates, indicate the need to address Indigenous women’s and families’ needs to improve maternal-child health outcomes and experiences. In response to current Indigenous maternal-child health disparities, Indigenous-led midwifery models of care provide holistic and culturally safe models of care and support that recognize complex physical, psychological, emotional, cultural, spiritual, and relational needs of Indigenous women and their families. Although Indigenous midwifery is identified as a beneficial practice for Indigenous communities, there is limited research in Alberta about the development, utilization, and impacts of Indigenous-led midwifery care in Alberta. This research partners with Juniper Midwives and Heart Lodge, located in Calgary, Alberta to understand the lived experiences and voices of urban Indigenous women, midwives, nurses, and support members to better understand the strengths and barriers within current care models. To ethically engage in research with rather than on Indigenous peoples and communities, this research utilizes community-based participatory research, as a collaborative approach, to focus on research areas that were identified by community partners. Using community supported qualitative research methods, fieldwork was conducted over the course of two years to gain insights into the local context of Indigenous maternal-child health in Calgary, Alberta. This includes observations at Heart Lodge, as a community-led maternal health initiative; twenty feminist oral history interviews with Indigenous women (including midwifery clients and other non-midwifery patient experiences), Indigenous midwives and nurses, Knowledge Keepers, and Heart Lodge “aunties”; and five digital stories created with participants to share their personal maternity care experiences. The data highlight the complex lived experiences of navigating pregnancy, birth, and health care services, while showcasing the transformative efforts of Indigenous midwives and support members in restoring bodily autonomy, relational care, and reproductive justice for Indigenous women and their families.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.025 | 0.007 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.003 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".