Unearthing Mother-Midwives: Black Women's Hidden Legacy in Canadian Maternal Care

Scholarship on Black women in the Americas has articulated the historical importance of maternal newborn care and reproductive healthcare as crucial factors shaping the experiences of women and pubescent girls. As part of the "economics of slavery," Black women were forced into childbearing and were denied the opportunity to mother their children. Some enslaved women were forced to breastfeed the children of their enslavers, helping to raise them. Some mothers also witnessed their children being sold, tearing their families apart. Enslaved and free Black women on and off plantations acquired midwifery skills informally because their families were often denied access to medical care. Despite Black women's presence on traditional Indigenous territories for centuries in what became Canada, midwifery, maternal, and overall holistic care work performed by Black women is rarely documented. Indeed, when Black women's relationship with babies and children is discussed, it is often as domestic workers caring for middle-class white women's children during the beginning and the middle of the twentieth century. The central question guiding this article is this: Based on the paucity of sources, what do we know about Black women's maternal experiences and midwifery skill set in the Canadian context? Drawing on Black Canadian feminist theorizing and cultural theorist Saidiya Hartman's notion of "critical fabulation," this paper seeks to explore how maternal healthcare and midwifery skills served as sites of racially gendered oppression and simultaneously how Black women's healing and midwifery skills served as vital familial, community, and racialized resistance from the colonial period to the beginning of the twentieth century.