Unreserved 50:10 Changing the conversation around menstruation The spring equinox has just passed, but Cutcha Risling Baldy's summer schedule is already looking jam-packed, as youth from her Hupa community prepare to celebrate something their tween peers may be apprehensive about or even avoid discussing: their first period. Risling Baldy has helped foster the resurgence of the Hupa Flower Dance, a ceremony honouring the start of menstruation. Her daughter, who took part a few years ago, belongs to a new generation openly talking about and thinking of menstruation in a positive light.
Revived by a group of Hupa women, the Flower Dance is a rite of passage that celebrates, guides and empowers young menstruators as they begin their transition into adulthood. Not celebrated openly for more than 100 years, "now, it's such a part of our existence and our lives we couldn't imagine a world without it," the associate professor of Native American studies at California State Polytechnic University Humboldt in Arcata, Calif., told Unreserved .
It's just one effort among many that Indigenous women are leading to shift the narrative about menstruation. They're doing away with shame and stigma in favour of honouring and supporting a young person's first period as an important and sacred transition in their life. Cutcha Risling Baldy, an associate professor of Native American studies at California State Polytechnic University, helped foster the return of the Huda Flower Dance, her people's .