“Breastfeeding is a cultural tradition,” shares Shawn Meyer, RN, BSN, CLC, a public health nurse and member of Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewa. “It’s ingrained in our history and the history of many other tribes across the country.”
The Native American breastfeeding tradition Meyer describes, however, has been disrupted by centuries of historical trauma, an insight that helps explain why Native Americans now have one of the lowest rates of breastfeeding of all other racial and ethnic groups.
When Indigenous People were forcefully dispossessed from their land, they not only lost their homes but were separated from their way of life. Cultural teachings and traditions were prevented by mandated assimilation policies, one of the most traumatic being the removal of native children from their families—in these instances, children were placed into boarding schools where their long hair was cut and they were punished, often violently, for speaking their language or practicing their cultural traditions. Even after the boarding schools were closed, hundreds of children continued to be separated from their families until the 1970s.
[For more on this story by Kim Moore-Salas & Shawn Meyer, go to https://www.nichq.org/insight/...-tomorrows-children?]
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