An Indigenous Mom Explains Why She Doesn’t Register Her Kids with the Government
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An Indigenous Mom Explains Why She Doesn’t Register Her Kids with the Government
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Over the few days I spent at the camp, Kanahus almost always had one of her four kids perched on her hip, whether she was prepping meals for long-distance visitors or standing in the path of mining trucks. I remember noticing how badass her kids were—at ease in the bush among a pretty strange crew of elders, protesters, police, mine workers and at least one reporter. Friends and family affectionately called them "freedom babies"—a term I spent quite some time over the next few months trying to fully understand.
Technically speaking, it means her kids were born outside a hospital and never got a Canadian birth certificate. Easy enough to grasp. It also means her family (for the most part) doesn't take money from the Canadian government, doesn't rely on universal Canadian medical coverage, doesn't enrol in Canadian schools. Whoa, right? On top of that Kanahus is on a personal mission to bring back lost culture and knowledge, starting with the way Indigenous nations bring babies into the world.
I recently called her up to ask about her quest to untangle her family from Canadian society, and to "catch babies" the way her ancestors did.
VICE: How did you first get into birthkeeping? Was it something you grew up with?
Kanahus Manuel: One of my movement sisters, she talked about not registering her babies. She talked about having her babies free and out of the hospital. She also told me about a couple from Lil'Wat First Nation near Pemberton who were not registering their children. She was pregnant and I was also five months pregnant, and she asked me to be at her birth. Her birth was the most amazing thing—you could see the snow capped mountains and the lake, and she had a fire at the foot of her bed—it was just a beautiful birth. She wanted to have it as traditional as she could. It was a first child for both of us, and it really opened my eyes up to the belief we as Indigenous women can birth our babies of our nation and not be dependent on any other colonial type of hospital system.
When you say your kids are "freedom babies"—what does that mean to you?
To me it means being able to have a vision of where we want to be as native people, how we want to raise this next generation. We can't talk about liberation if we're continuing to birth children into the system, to colonize our own children—their birth and their education. Not registering is breaking away from these institutions.
https://www.vice.com/en_ca/article/an-indigenous-mom-explains-why-she-doesnt-register-her-kids-with-the-government
We talked to Kanahus Manuel about raising her four "freedom babies" off-grid and her mission to bring back traditional midwifery.
When I first met Kanahus Manuel, she was holding down an Indigenous resistance camp on a mining road in the geographical middle of British Columbia. A copper and gold mine had spilled millions of tonnes of mining waste into rivers and lakes on her traditional Secwepemc territory, and she was leading a charge to stop the mine from reopening.Over the few days I spent at the camp, Kanahus almost always had one of her four kids perched on her hip, whether she was prepping meals for long-distance visitors or standing in the path of mining trucks. I remember noticing how badass her kids were—at ease in the bush among a pretty strange crew of elders, protesters, police, mine workers and at least one reporter. Friends and family affectionately called them "freedom babies"—a term I spent quite some time over the next few months trying to fully understand.
Technically speaking, it means her kids were born outside a hospital and never got a Canadian birth certificate. Easy enough to grasp. It also means her family (for the most part) doesn't take money from the Canadian government, doesn't rely on universal Canadian medical coverage, doesn't enrol in Canadian schools. Whoa, right? On top of that Kanahus is on a personal mission to bring back lost culture and knowledge, starting with the way Indigenous nations bring babies into the world.
I recently called her up to ask about her quest to untangle her family from Canadian society, and to "catch babies" the way her ancestors did.
VICE: How did you first get into birthkeeping? Was it something you grew up with?
Kanahus Manuel: One of my movement sisters, she talked about not registering her babies. She talked about having her babies free and out of the hospital. She also told me about a couple from Lil'Wat First Nation near Pemberton who were not registering their children. She was pregnant and I was also five months pregnant, and she asked me to be at her birth. Her birth was the most amazing thing—you could see the snow capped mountains and the lake, and she had a fire at the foot of her bed—it was just a beautiful birth. She wanted to have it as traditional as she could. It was a first child for both of us, and it really opened my eyes up to the belief we as Indigenous women can birth our babies of our nation and not be dependent on any other colonial type of hospital system.
When you say your kids are "freedom babies"—what does that mean to you?
To me it means being able to have a vision of where we want to be as native people, how we want to raise this next generation. We can't talk about liberation if we're continuing to birth children into the system, to colonize our own children—their birth and their education. Not registering is breaking away from these institutions.
https://www.vice.com/en_ca/article/an-indigenous-mom-explains-why-she-doesnt-register-her-kids-with-the-government
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Re: An Indigenous Mom Explains Why She Doesn’t Register Her Kids with the Government
Wouldn't it be amazing to be one of those children ?
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