Hospital staff is always quick to notice when there’s a Hummingbird in the facility. If the doctors and nurses have been through this before, they know the birthing team tending to the pregnant patient will now include one more. Medical duties in the delivery room will be up to the clinicians, but staying overnight with the new mother? The Hummingbird will do that.
And advocating for her? The Hummingbird will handle that. As for the traditional cultural ceremonies performed during and after birth, the Hummingbird will take care of that, too. Think of a typical doula — a person, usually a woman, trained to provide emotional and physical support before, during and after birth — and you’d identify only some of a Hummingbird’s role.
The Hummingbird’s work as an Indigenous doula, tending to Indigenous women, is particularly consequential. It leans on traditional birthing practices involving song and spiritual rituals, all while fighting for safety in a health care system where the Native population faces some of the worst outcomes. “A Hummingbird’s .
.. mission is healthy Indigenous babies born into healthy Indigenous families, supported by healthy Indigenous communities,” Camie Goldhammer (Sisseton Wahpeton Oyate), founding executive director of , tells TODAY.
com. She describes bygone times when Native doulas were the norm. A local woman, entrusted by the community, would traditionally support birthing women in the tribe through pregnancy until they welcomed new .