Birthing Vital Stories: an examination of First Nations Australian maternal care narratives

Abstract

This thesis attends to the silences (as opposed to ‘gaps’) (Tynan and Bishop 2022) in research surrounding First Nations Australian experiences of maternal care in the shadow of (post)colonial violence. Inspired by knowledge of similar rates of maternal mortality and morbidity for both African-American and First Nations Australian women, as well as considerable reflexivity as an African-American woman and full-spectrum birth doula, this thesis is a site of my creative, and ethical imperative to Black-Indigenous solidarity (see Gaztambide-Fernández 2012). Throughout this thesis, I explore the narratives of First Nations Australian women in maternal care and the implications of birth narratives on culturally safe care, epistemic injustice, and maternal phenomenology, as well as experiences of postcolonial violence in Australia. In this thesis, I draw upon podcasts featuring First Nations mothers and birthwork professionals (midwives, doulas), as well as interviews with mothers, to investigate maternal care that is ‘desire-led’ (see Tuck 2009). Further, I consider 1) birth stories and their significance as they relate to the First Nations Australian people—as well as the utility of poetry in this context; 2) birthing on Country and its implications for a maternal phenomenology reflective of the experience and positioning of First Nations mothers, as they seek care in (post)colonial Australia; 3) consider experiences and trouble models of care through a critical, and decolonial lens. I employ an Indigenist methodology (see Wilson 2001, Rix et al 2019), including poetic inquiry (via transcript poems and autoethnopoetics), yarning with/through data, and an engagement with interpretive phenomenological analysis; this ultimately posits the First Nations Australian maternal phenomenological canon as praxiologically vital and vibrant, in striving for reproductive justice and Indigenous futurity. I found, by chapter: 1) (‘Stories’) Significant (and available) repositories for the maternal experiences of Frist Nations women are limited. There these are available, they are disparate, due to a lack of attunement and commitment to stories’ use in the improvement of care practice. This is an issue of epistemic injustice. Further, there are a several culturally-specific conventions to First Nations stories. Creative methods (such as poetry) may serve as a more fitting method to engage with First Nations maternal care stories. 2) (‘Country’) Birthing on Country, a practice for some First Nations women, illustrates the limits of traditional (Western) maternal phenomenological canon. BoC troubles Western theories of gestational embodiment, by the consideration of land and dispossession thereof during colonization and its afterlives, the place of kincentricity (see Martinez and Hall, 2008; Salmón, 2000) in pregnancy, and the situated biopolitics of Indigeneity in the context of Australian maternal care. 3) (‘Care’) ‘Slow violence’, a ‘violence that occurs gradually and out of sight, a violence of delayed destruction that is dispersed across time and space, an attritional violence that is typically not viewed as violence at all’ (see Nixon 2011, Christian and Dowler 2019) is a framework by which we can contextualise participants’ experiences of epistemic estrangement though unsuitable, and violent contexts. I posit that ‘culturally competent’ care, while adopted as appropriate practice, is limited as a site of decolonial praxis. I also offer a new materialist consideration, centered around an imperative to epistemic justice: the archive of First Nations maternal care stories as a site of vital/vibrant epistemic assemblage that informs decolonial maternal care praxis.

Date of Award	31 Dec 2024
Original language	English
Awarding Institution	The University of Manchester
Supervisor	Sophie Woodward (Supervisor) & Petra Nordqvist (Supervisor)