When NewMexicoWomen.org conducted our community-based research on the needs of women and girls in New Mexico, we came to the conclusion that gender justice and healing are essential to the well-being of women and girls in our state. In brief, we define gender justice as freedom from patriarchy and misogyny, and healing as a return to health from an unbalanced or unhealthy state. Nicolle Gonzales, Founder and Executive Director of Changing Woman Initiative exemplifies for us what gender justice and healing look and feel like together in action.
Nicolle Gonzales is a Navajo woman, mother, wife and Nurse Midwife in Northern New Mexico. For years she has had the dream of creating a Native American Women’s Health Collective and Birthing Center for indigenous women’s wellness and birthing care in our state. With this dream at the center, she founded Changing Woman Initiative which, seeks to draw on cultural strengths to renew indigenous birth knowledge and healing through holistic approaches and community empowerment. It is focused on developing a culturally centered reproductive wellness and birth center.”
When we spoke to Nicolle last week, she had just left a four-day Indigenous Birth Conference in Seattle with 460 indigenous birth workers, and was getting ready to unplug for a couple of nights under the stars in Washington. She has been on a journey throughout the states to raise awareness and funds for her vision, and will be coming back shortly to launch a soft-start birthing center including home-based midwifery for Native American clients, train her birth assistant and midwife student, and provide wellness checks to women survivors of domestic violence at the Esperanza Shelter in Santa Fe twice a month.
Nicolle shared that they are partnering with Esperanza Shelter because women fleeing domestic violence often don’t feel safe using their health insurance as it may be a means for their abuser to locate them, and often their insurance is cut-off when they escape abusive relationships. She recruited a family nurse practitioner to work with her and intends to provide services like prescription refills in addition to bringing healing to these women in ways traditional medicine does not.
As a Nurse-Midwife who has worked in hospital settings for 15 years, Nicolle knows the modern medical system well and understands that it does not heal in whole ways. She spoke to the need for her and her team to do ceremony with self, family, and individuals in order to clear past experiences of trauma and of being in toxic work environments and relationships. Her goal is to treat the “full person and not just parts of their bodies,” in her practice. She believes in uplifting and integrating traditional midwifery practices like “womb massage and ceremonies which are passed on through healers and medicine people.” In her experience, when traditional culture is integrated into birth care new mothers feel “empowered, centered, and connected to their ancestors.”
Despite the wisdom and stories that substantiate the need for whole-person (mind, body, and spirit) care, Nicolle has a seen a thread of barriers to indigenous midwifery throughout our nation. She encountered stories of both state governments and tribal governments refusing to acknowledge traditional midwifery at her conference last week. There are licensing regulations that interrupt pathways of apprenticeship for traditional healers. Additionally, in the past several decades, midwifery, a tradition found in human culture throughout the world, has become a practice mostly accessible to and associated with white women in the US. This results largely from the strict regulations governments have made around midwifery, forcing most populations into hospital births, and favoring midwifery licensure and accessibility for those with economic and educational privilege.
Changing Woman Initiative seeks to disrupt this rising inequity around birthing access through decolonizing birth and renewing and strengthening Indigenous birth knowledge and holistic healing. Join us in supporting their critical work for birthing justice. You can donate here to support Changing Woman Initiative’s work for gender justice and healing in New Mexico!