10

Nature, Spirit, Home: Back-to-the-Land Childbirth in BC’s Kootenay Region1

Megan J. Davies

Born in 1952 in Honolulu, Pamela Stevenson came to the University of Victoria as an undergraduate student in 1974, but she did not remain long. The following year she took her tuition fees and bought a horse, a kiln, and five hundred pounds of clay; with her husband she then made her way to the Slocan Valley, where she found “Wilderness, mountains and rivers without end.” She believed that within “an incredible community of compassionate, educated urban refugees … [there] was no better place to raise a family.” Four years later, Pamela’s daughter, Tara Mani Stevenson, was born at home in Winlaw with the help of Abra Palumbo and Pat Armstrong, two unregistered community midwives in the region. Family photos of the birth celebrate Tara’s first day of life, as she was taken to visit the garden that her parents had created, wrapped in a handmade community baby quilt sewn by her grandmothers and local friends.2

10.1 Nature and homebirth: Pamela Stevenson takes a walk in her Winlaw, BC, garden with her newborn daughter, Tara, 1978. Source: Stevenson photo collection.

Women like Pamela Stevenson were part of a radical redefinition of childbirth in Canada and the United States during the 1970s and 1980s. Potential parents allied with sympathetic health practitioners to create a sustained critique of the standard hospital birthing procedures of the 1950s and 1960s, which they regarded as having pathologized and medicalized a natural process of the female body.3 The social movement engaged in the “new midwifery” and homebirth projects reconstructed birth not as a medical event, but as an important life moment that spoke to the natural, collective, female, and spiritual aspects of reproduction and that should take place not on the maternity ward, but in a familiar home setting.4 As was the case at other counterculture locales, such as The Farm in Tennessee, homebirth in the Kootenays represented an embrace of organic life processes and the world of nature.5 In each of these locations, men played a supportive role, but women spearheaded the grassroots push for change in birthing practices.6

Interconnected themes of nature, community, and home thread through Stevenson’s story of the birth of her daughter and other Kootenay homebirthing tales from the 1970s and 1980s. Videotaped interviews with these mothers and their midwives are my primary source material for this research, but I also use personal photographs, textile art, documents that homebirth advocates and midwives produced, and books that midwives and their clients consulted.7 The oral testimonies that I collected are both narrative constructions of the lives of a group of counterculture women and a documentation of their daily experiences. They capture important subjective experiences not otherwise accessible.

The story of homebirth in the Kootenays illuminates the role of counterculture women in creating cultural and social capital and constructing alternative identities.8 Revisiting the emergence of counterculture homebirth through the lens of environmental history helps bring key themes of place, nature, and maternalism into focus. Historian Carolyn Merchant would recognize Stevenson’s triumphant trek through the garden with her newborn daughter, delivered at home without recourse to medical technology, as a recovery narrative, demonstrating how counterculture women reclaimed nature through the act of birth.9 Homebirthing back-to-the-land women may or may not have read Herbert Marcuse’s One Dimensional Man (1964), but their praxis demonstrates that they were questioning the fundamental notion of scientific progress, rejecting institutional bureaucracies and health technologies, and reconceptualizing the application of medical knowledge. Their understanding of safe and appropriate natal care moved them to create an underground system that was community- and female-centred, non-invasive, preventative, and pluralistic. Homebirth and midwifery—and women in the counterculture more generally—consistently bisect the human/nature dichotomy that, according to Gregg Mitman, environmental historians need to interrogate.10

The homebirthing women of the Kootenays whom I interviewed were interested in “quality of life” environmental issues; for them, the environment encompassed their bodies, their homes, their children, and their food. Like the bearded men on the ship Phyllis Cormack bound for the island of Amchitka on Greenpeace’s first protest, homebirth advocates were also deeply political, taking counterculture women to the same margins of legality as early environmental activists. In Canada, midwifery was alegal (outside the law) until the 1990s, and homebirthing women were keenly aware that if they or their baby died, their midwife or their family could be charged with manslaughter.11 The decision to have a homebirth may therefore have appeared to be a personal choice, but the risks it entailed—and the mediation of those risks—were collective and political rather than individual and private.

This chapter begins by situating Kootenay homebirth and midwifery within the broader counterculture history of the 1970s. I then consider the back-to-the-land homestead and the birthing body as political and cultural sites for reclaiming childbirth. The third section discusses how homebirth fostered the formation of alternative counterculture identities through multiple avenues of social and cultural expression. The “natural” and the “homemade”—that which derives from the home space or the home community—emerge as key motifs for homebirth in the Kootenays, motifs designed and executed by counterculture women. Underpinning this narrative is an analysis of how marginal places and practices hold particular value as potential sites of resistance because of their physical and ideological distance from the mainstream. This interpretation therefore posits place, praxis, and the spirit as being of equal importance in fostering radical social and personal change.

IN THE CONTEXT OF SOCIAL MOVEMENTS

The late 1960s and the 1970s were a period when alternative culture and politics flourished in Canada’s westernmost province. This movement resulted in a wide-ranging set of initiatives, which included small socialist and feminist presses, radical newspapers, co-op radio stations, radical health groups, communal housing and food co-operatives, experimental education, art, and architectural design projects. While no definitive profile exists of the men and women involved in these schemes, or in the broader movement that gave birth to them, most were young, educated, middle-class, and white. Numerous participants migrated to British Columbia from the United States and other parts of Canada, including thousands of young American draft resisters and others who protested their country’s involvement in the Vietnam War by crossing its northern border.12

This search for alternative lifestyles had a strong rural orientation.13 Like Mark Vonnegut, who moved to an isolated commune north of Powell River, British Columbia, in the early 1970s, many who questioned dominant political and social mores relocated to the countryside because of concerns regarding urban pollution, alienating work processes, and the high cost of city life. Vonnegut captured the radical, experimental mood of the back-to-the-land movement in his book The Eden Express: “We expected to get closer to nature, to each other and our feelings … and develop entirely new ways of being and experiencing the world … free of the cities, of capitalism, of racism, industrialism, they had to be for the better.”14

Young back-to-the-landers settled on the islands and in rural communities around the Strait of Juan de Fuca and in scattered settlements throughout the province. Yet in many ways the Kootenay region was the quintessential BC rural retreat, holding near-mythical status within the counterculture with its green mountains, clean water, and cheap land. People came to the area from California, the Prairies, and central and eastern Canada to establish farms and live closer to nature, rejuvenating communities where the population had been in decline since the late 1950s.

The emergence of homebirth and midwifery in places like Argenta, Nelson, Kaslo, and the Slocan Valley was part of a broader project of creating an alternative community.15 Like their urban sisters in Vancouver, Kootenay homebirthing women were also involved in creating non-traditional schools, new food systems, and environmental organizations like the ones chronicled by Nancy Janovicek and Kathleen Rodgers.16 The feminist critique of birth as a site of stolen female power made sense to this group; many of them had personally experienced male physicians as paternalistic, judgmental, and condescending.17 Adopting the countercultural use of the body as a site of rebellion against mainstream society and rejecting the idea that nudity was reprehensible, they accepted the body as “natural.”18 Most of my interviewees were also attracted to non-invasive, alternative health therapeutics and aware of childbirth reform work being done in other locales by renegade physicians, radical midwives, and parents searching for natural birthing options.19 When Pat Armstrong posted a notice in Winlaw in 1971 advertising childbirth education classes, she found a ready clientele.20

These new regional residents, many of whom had been raised in suburban or urban settings, saw the Kootenays as an unspoiled and healthy space where they could recapture the lifestyle and values of an imagined rural past. But unlike urbanites who may envision a bucolic existence in an otherwise sanitized countryside, the back-to-the-landers anticipated that their engagement with the rural environment would be productive, even elemental.21 They understood self-sufficiency and home production as key aspects of the movement. Earthy, “traditional,” healthy, and clearly home-crafted, birth in a Kootenay A-frame house fit neatly into the 1970s back-to-the-land project.22

HOMESPACES AND THE NATURAL

Home is central to the childbirth stories I collected and was fundamental to re-scripting female reproduction as a counterculture event. Memories of the experience were inevitably peppered with evocative descriptions of the last trip to the outhouse, the dishes left on the table from the night before, the unfortunate choice of the loft bed in which to birth. The decision to deliver in a dwelling rather than in a hospital served to frame counterculture birthing within the long-standing cult of domesticity and multiple ideologies that cluster around and impinge on the act of birth—beliefs about motherhood, the family, fatherhood, and parenthood and childhood.23 Yet the counterculture home—associated with good health, “place identity,” security, and privacy—was also a staging site for bringing nature, the female body, maternalist culture, and the community back into the birth process.24 The back-to-the-land “homeplace” therefore functioned simultaneously as a location where the act of birth was honoured as traditionally female and familial and as a revolutionary space where birth, nature, and motherhood could be radicalized and rendered political through resistance to mainstream medical dominance.25

Referencing a historical time when women gave birth at home, and home was central to the circle of life, homebirth also introduced the element of choice in birth, a key aspect of alternative health movements of the period.26 Pamela Stevenson told me, “Home is a temple. And when you have your child at home with the music you want, and the candles you want, and the pace you want, and the people you trust more than anything . . . it is completely unviolated, sacred space.”27 A natural, drug-free homebirth reclaimed traditional use of the home as a space where important life transitions took place and reworked the postwar family home in countercultural terms. The doctor, the institution, and, by extension, the state were excluded from an event that welcomed father, family, midwives, and friends.28

This process had important gendered implications. The close identification of home with self that was evident among back-to-the-land women, and the work they did in producing homeplaces, echoes the lives of their mothers; “home” was an extremely powerful theme in the years following the disruption of World War II, when many Canadian families struggled to find places to live.29 As Elaine Tyler May makes clear in her work on American families during the Cold War era, the external and internal organization and appearance of family dwellings were important characteristics of postwar society.30 The Kootenay women transposed this intense identification with home onto a very different kind of living space, a place where “the natural” and the home-crafted were central.

The women who shared their stories with me believe that being born in the rural back-to-the-land home, so profoundly part of the land on which it rested, grounded a baby in a deep physical sense, creating an identity that was intimately connected to place. Abra Palumbo named her second child Forest after the woods on Hornby Island where she was born. “My daughter still lives on this tiny piece of earth that she was born on,” Slocan Valley resident Lisa Farr told me, “and that is part of her connectedness to this land and this place and her family.”31

Back-to-the-land women engaged in many types of labour that were not traditionally female—most notably tree-planting—yet their work as producers of children and re-creators of the natural clearly placed them in conventional female positions in counterculture households. Journalist Myrna Kostash found that counterculture women were expected to do the bulk of the daily work in the home, cooking, caring for children, and managing tasks such a laundry, often without electricity, running water, or the labour-saving devices their mothers had enjoyed.32 More recently, scholars have emphasized the essential gender conservatism of the movement: the domestic role of women in the counterculture was essentially subservient. Historian Gretchen Lemke-Santangelo has argued that the counterculture normalized heterosexuality and was “deeply committed to so-called feminine traits and values.”33 “Natural” food preparation, as detailed in West Coast counterculture cookbooks such as Laurel’s Kitchen and Earth Market Cook Book: Recipes for a Simple Life, involved labour- and time-intensive processes such as canning, grinding wheat, kneading bread dough, and making yogurt.34 American counterculture historian Warren Belasco rightly notes that this kind of slow-food preparation was in itself a meditation and a protest against “modernity,” but he fails to acknowledge the labour of counterculture women in creating the natural and the nostalgic.35 In fact, there are clear parallels between making natural food and giving birth naturally: both were processes that claimed a link to older, pre-industrial modes of living. But women’s roles and responsibilities made this connection even clearer.

Yet the history of counterculture homebirth can also be interpreted as a place where women claimed power, albeit in traditional spheres.36 Known in the region as “women who were not afraid of blood or organic stuff, not fearful of the birth process,” the Kootenay community midwives were figures of knowledge and authority and were skilled at creating spaces undefined by biomedicine and institutional control—safe home situations where women could know and own the profound moment of birth.37 Trained through a local apprenticeship system by experienced colleagues and radical physician Carolyn DeMarco, midwives such as Barbara Ray and Abra Palumbo brought a hybridity of alternative and biomedical techniques to the counterculture homebirth.38 Like the other midwives, Camille Bush had blue cohosh and angelica root on hand for assistance in expelling the placenta, ginger compresses for perinatal support, and shepherd’s purse to help control bleeding.39 But the midwives also knew the mechanics of birth and were competent in the use of standard medical procedures including sterile technique, blood and urine testing, and pelvic measurement.40

Just as counterculture nudists rejected the puritanism of churches, schools, and media in freely displaying their bodies, homebirthing women resisted the authority claimed by medicine to manage their bodies. Routine hospital delivery regimes of the period included shaving pubic hair, insisting that women labour only on their back, relegating the prospective father to a waiting room, using hospital gowns and drapes to mask the body, and employing an anesthetic that obliterated the woman’s memory of the moment of birth. Some hospitals even strapped women in labour to the delivery table.41 In contrast, the counterculture home offered women the opportunity to reject entirely these medical models and to labour and birth where and how they chose, surrounded by intimate friends and family. The midwives were women whom a pregnant woman would know from the local daycare or health food store, and a closer relationship between the two women would be forged over the months of gestation.

DeMarco’s photograph album chronicling births she attended reveals these elements.42 The gaze on the naked female body in DeMarco’s album is neither clinical nor sexual, but celebratory, for the images commemorate the female body in the labour of birthing or focus on the moments after the baby has safely arrived.

10.2 Back-to-the-land birthing environs: Woman in labour in the loft of a Kootenay cabin with midwife and female friend in attendance, 1973. Photograph by Jean Hanley Wells. Source: Private photo collection.

While birth is clearly the central topic in this collection of images, home, the world of women, and the natural setting are key framing devices. In one series, a woman in heavy labour stands on a porch in the sunshine. Behind her, a woman is applying pressure to the pregnant woman’s lower back, likely to alleviate the pain of back labour. To her left and very close is DeMarco, and to her right, with an arm cradling the labouring woman, is yet another woman, long hair swept back in a braid.

Like homebirthing manuals of the era, these photographs demonstrate that women’s bodies were honoured during a homebirth, and the sense of shame that imbued the naked form in the post–World War II era expunged.43 While environmental history literature on nudism is limited, I link the presentation of the body in DeMarco’s album to Marguerite Shaffer’s analysis of the egalitarian and natural unclothed body at American nudist resorts of the postwar period, though my research on the homebirthing body suggests a need to rework her understanding of counterculture nudism as personalized political performance.44 In one image from DeMarco’s collection, a heavily pregnant woman stands smiling, naked, in her garden. Another sits unclothed on the crossbeam of a house under construction, nursing a tiny newborn infant. In a photo that appears to have been taken shortly after birth, a nude man and woman lie in bed, a tiny baby tucked close to the woman’s breast.

10.3 Homebirth as a female-centred event: Sylvie Lafrance in labour in her home by the Slocan River, 1984. Source: DeMarco photo collection.

The counterculture home was the pivotal site for the homebirthing work of women in the movement. Nature, evoked through a celebration of the maternal body and the history of home as a site for female-centred birth, was a key component of the argument for homebirth. This linkage between nature, the home, and the birth, however, must be appreciated as radical and traditional at the same time.

HOMEBIRTH AND THE FORMATION OF IDENTITY

For the counterculture women whom I interviewed for this project, the creation of alternative identities through homebirth was both a personal and a collective process, shaped through an affinity with organic processes and an appreciation for the special capacities of women. Relocating childbirth from the hospital to the homestead, these women emphasized their self-reliant, healthy practices and capable bodies; the personal growth that accompanied homebirth; and their engagement in collective cultural practices that acknowledged and celebrated birth as a social and spiritual event. Clearly regarding homebirth as rooted in the local social and physical environment of the region, the Kootenay Parents, a group formed in 1981 to advocate for childbirth choices, argued that homebirth deserved respect as part of parents’ culture in the Kootenays.45

Birthing in the counterculture Kootenay homestead was integral to a whole set of individual and collective alternative life choices, connecting a longer tradition of maternalist thought and identity with liberation philosophies of the era.46 Leslie Campos stated, “For me midwifery was about personal choice and personal power. Everything you do, you do naturally—whole food, kerosene lamps, outhouses. … When you look to the medical or educational system or any system to have all the answers for you, I think you end up with less freedom.”47 Campos, who moved to the Slocan Valley in 1976 and gave birth to several children at home in the following years, points toward the way in which personal and collective empowerment, self-reliance, and nature converged in counterculture homebirth. Ellie Kremler’s oral history makes similar connections. Kremler came to the Kootenays in pursuit of a pioneering lifestyle, seeking “an intense participation in the life process,” by growing her own food and running the local co-operative. Homebirth, she told me, was part of this larger picture.48

Like many other women and men who migrated to the Kootenays in the 1970s, Lisa Farr described the move as a transformative life experience, interpreting her decision to have a natural homebirth in 1981 as an aspect of the construction of an alternative individual identity:

To be somewhere where I could be myself … there is something about personal growth and becoming a bigger version of yourself—this is my choice, this is me having this baby and taking responsibility for the choices and who I become through [the process] that is really important.49

Accordingly, counterculture homebirth was about taking greater personal responsibility for health, claiming control of one’s body, individual identity, and hence destiny—hallmarks of the late-twentieth-century alternative health movement and the broader back-to-the-land ethos.50 Alternative identities were formed through self-reliance, spirituality, and the bringing of nature (or the natural) into daily life. Many of the Kootenay narratives that I collected bear a striking similarity to the typology of illness in Arthur Frank’s quest narratives, wherein the “sick” person gains the ability to be self-reflective and proactive, often undertaking heroic battles with the unenlightened in the process.51 But counterculture homebirth differs both in the integration of nature and politics in the process and in the collective nature of the enterprise. The larger counterculture community provided important practical and emotional scaffolding for this course of action, and community midwives aided prospective parents in preparing for the unique birth they were “seeking and creating.”52

The quest elements of the Kootenay homebirthing narratives demonstrate that place and a back-to-the-land lifestyle afforded birthing mothers an identity as physically strong and capable women. Local midwives echo this perspective, typically describing their early clients as self-reliant, well educated, and extremely physically fit. Community midwife Pat Armstrong reported that her back-to-the-land clientele from the 1970s were in excellent shape: “They ate out of their organic gardens, chopped firewood, and helped build their own homes. A Kootenay woman would not necessarily shy away from shingling a roof at seven months pregnant.”53 Several midwives that I interviewed linked the lack of complications in pregnancy and childbirth among Kootenay counterculture women to the fact that these women were “highly motivated, highly educated, awake and aware … living on the land, eating well.”54

Although not all claimed the feminist label, Kootenay women who chose homebirth understood their actions to be part of a larger movement in which women gained control over their own bodies. While only a few of the women that I interviewed identified their actions specifically as feminist, most employed the language and ethics of the movement, emphasizing the importance of choice and the element of power inherent in reclaiming birth from the medical establishment.55 Here again, we can see how maternalist understandings fuse with a radical contemporary ideology—in this case, feminism. After her first delivery at home, midwife Armstrong was “infused with power” and “knew that women had to take control.”56 Susan Vetrano, Liz Tanner, and Diane Holt, mothers who lived and gave birth in Argenta, all agreed on the importance of women having the power to read their own bodies and make their own choices in pregnancy and childbirth.57

For homebirthing women in Argenta, Nelson, Kaslo, and the Slocan Valley, crafting identities as responsible, self-reliant, and personally powerful people meant self-education: learning as much as possible in an experiential fashion about the bodily processes of pregnancy and childbirth. Counterculture childbirth education worked on individual and collective levels, rendering expert knowledge accessible to a lay clientele in a fashion typical of the broader women’s health movement and of alternative social movements of the period more generally.58 Pregnant women, their partners, and their children attended biweekly prenatal clinics run by the midwives, first at the house of Dr. DeMarco, then at the Vallican community hall, and later at the old South Slocan schoolhouse, midway between Nelson and Castlegar.59 Expectant mothers would come for a morning or afternoon visit; all would attend a shared lunch with a visiting speaker and a discussion group. Posited as natural, the pregnant female body was thus knowable to an audience unschooled in medicine. Midwife Camille Bush noted as well the importance of the clinics as purposeful efforts at building community, an illustration of how homebirthing worked to foster social capital in the counterculture community of the Kootenays.60

Health historian Mike Saks identifies the countercultural critique of scientific medicine as essentially anti-modern, discarding notions of rational progress, objective medicine, and professional expertise. At first glance, this characterization should fit the Kootenay homebirthing mothers perfectly, but it does not. At the biweekly clinics, pregnant women connected with a hybrid form of midwifery practice that encompassed both the biomedical and the alternative, as care at the clinic was holistic. The midwives checked blood pressure and tested urine but also wanted to know about family dynamics and birthing dreams. Similarly, the homebirthing mothers I interviewed were familiar with the ideas of British obstetrician Grantly Dick-Read and French physician Fernand Lamaze; at the same time, many still have a cherished copy of Spiritual Midwifery, the seminal book by American midwife Ina May Gaskin, herself a back-to-the-land pioneer.61 Perhaps reflecting the idiosyncratic way that counterculture connections worked, while Kootenay midwives were connected to homebirth activities outside the region, few of the birthing women I interviewed were aware of Cheryl Anderson’s and Raven Lang’s radical midwifery work in south coastal British Columbia or Lang’s activism at the Santa Cruz Birth Center in California.

The key Kootenay childbirth educational text was Responsible Home-Centred Childbirth: A Parents’ Manual, compiled in the late 1970s by the local Kootenay midwives. In the style of other back-to-the-land how-to manuals such as the Whole Earth Catalog, which also explained “nature” to the uninitiated, the ninety-two-page volume is comprehensive; it includes a detailed description of the processes of pregnancy, childbirth, and the post-partum period; information sections on nutrition, useful herbs, sexual relations, and what to do if the midwife did not arrive in time; and a list of eighty-nine books for further reading.62 Community midwife Barbara Ray told me that the purpose of the manual was to “take the mystique out of childbirth,” thereby democratizing medical knowledge. With the entire process clearly laid out in the comprehensive volume, expectant mothers and their partners had to take responsibility for knowing “everything.”63 Parents were expected to be materially prepared for a homebirth with a sterile pack of sheets, washcloths, towels, rubbing alcohol, olive oil, Dettol, sterile water and gloves, herb teas for labour and delivery, a large bowl for the placenta, and a “good reliable vehicle with [an] extra gas reserve can.”64

10.4 Cover of Responsible Home-Centred Childbirth: A Parents’ Manual, compiled in the late 1970s by the local Kootenay midwives. Source: BC Midwifery Collection (Megan Davies, collector), University of British Columbia Archives, Vancouver.

The process of labouring and giving birth beyond the biomedical gaze also offered powerful moments of experiential education and knowledge formation that bisected the spiritual and pragmatic realms. After Ellie Kremler’s daughter Faith was born, midwife Abra Palumbo showed Kremler and her partner how the tree of life was visible in the placenta and encouraged them to eat the organ.65 Similarly, Lisa Farr, a vegetarian for years at the time, believed that she was replenishing vital minerals lost during a post-birth hemorrhage when she took her midwife’s advice and ate the cooked placenta.66

Community formation and the creation of social capital and individual and collective identity also operated on practical and pragmatic levels among the birthing families of the region, contributing to self-reliance as a collaborative rather than individual activity. Counterculture neighbours traditionally stocked up the freezer of a woman about to give birth.67 In Argenta, the isolated former Quaker settlement on the east side of Kootenay Lake, a group of young families were “all doing it together” in the late 1970s. Neighbours shared childcare and took birth photographs for one another, and “everyone helped out after a birth.” When Liz Tanner hemorrhaged after delivering her son Forest, the men of the community rescued her from the top floor of the family A-frame, sawing a hole through the bedroom floor, lowering Liz down on an old door, and driving mother and midwife to hospital in a station wagon.68

To a large extent, Kootenay counterculture homebirth and midwifery practice existed outside the late-twentieth-century economic system. Local community midwives knew that they would likely receive negligible financial remuneration for their work; as Ray told me, “It wasn’t about the money.”69 In the early 1980s, the fee for a birth was normally one hundred dollars per midwife, but many cash-strapped parents paid fifty dollars—or nothing at all.70 Rather, Kootenay residents frequently paid for midwifery services in kind, with natural products from the home environment, a reflection of the countercultural belief that privileged informal methods of economic exchange.71 Ray accepted a year’s worth of eggs, garden produce, and car maintenance in return for midwifery services.72 Similarly, Bush remembered being compensated with homemade bread and canning, firewood, boxes of apples and garden produce, housecleaning, and childcare.73 Such articles and services reflect an understanding of homebirth as an individualized experience that was linked to older agrarian traditions and thus oppositional to an impersonal, biotechnological hospital birth. Some payments were specially handcrafted objects imbued with the meaning of the moment, like the teapot fashioned for Palumbo by potter and mother Pamela Stevenson, its lid the exact circumference of a fully dilated cervix.74

A similar counterculture interest in creating alternative identities through a celebration of nature and the handcrafted is reflected in the story of Kootenay birthing quilts, each block imbued with meaning and painstakingly produced by women. Here, nature and art serve both a personal purpose, as a unique and special gift for a tiny infant, and a social function, by fostering alternative culture and community. Examples of nostalgic rural female art, the images appliquéd and embroidered on the small squares frequently depict flowers and butterflies, both of which are emblematic of the idealized rural environment of the Kootenays. Some squares blend imagery from nature with deeper philosophical statements, like the tree of life depicted on the quilt made for midwife Ilene Bell’s son Thomas.75 Others, like the stork depositing an egg on Palumbo’s daughter’s quilt, reference the process of birth. Heart motifs that evoke the emotional space of homebirth, sometimes entwined with flowers, were also common. A wild rose detail from a 1984 birth quilt was a “message” about wild roses, suggested by an Aboriginal healer as an herbal remedy for that particular sick newborn baby.76

10.5 Women and children inspecting baby Anna Palumbo’s new birth quilt, in Perry Siding, BC, 1982. Source: Palumbo photo collection.

Collaborative crafts like quiltmaking are quintessential female activities and were strongly reminiscent of the imagined past that Kootenay back-to-the-landers were striving to recreate. Men might contribute a quilt block, but this was exceptionally rare. Typically, a group of women would work collectively to create the piece, each contributing a block that contained a personal message to mother and child. Quilts thus spelled out important messages about individuality, but within a collective context. Palumbo, who crafted a tiny suede fetus for a quilt in 1979, told me that the birth quilts reinforced the ethic that “You are not just born into a family, you are born into a community.”77 The fact that each quilt was made by hand demonstrates the prioritization of homemade over purchased goods within the counterculture as well as the importance of collective process.

Historian Pamela Klassen observes that homebirthing women have the capacity to create spirituality at the same moment in which they are creating individual and collective identity.78 Klassen’s thoughtful analysis is useful in interpreting the Blessing Way, a procreation ceremony enacted by counterculture people of the Kootenays. A Blessing Way ritual could be a deeply intimate event, to bring peace after a miscarriage, or as large as the ceremony presented by the Kootenay Childbirth Counselling Centre as a workshop for mothers and babies at the 1984 Festival of Awareness, held at the David Thompson University Centre and attended by an estimated seven hundred people.79

10.6 Blessing Way ritual: Midwife Abra Palumbo bathing future mother Irme Mende’s feet, in Lemon Creek, BC, 1981. Source: Palumbo photo collection.

Barbara Ray explained that the Blessing Way honoured the act of birth as “not just a physical process, but a rite of passage, truly a transformation.” The natural and the female were key motifs employed in the event. An appropriation and adaptation of a Navajo coming-of-age ritual, a Blessing Way usually took place before the birth of a child, but the changeable, individualistic nature of the event meant that it was also used to acknowledge a miscarriage or celebrate a marriage. Wearing colourful clothing and bringing a gift either handmade or infused with the special meaning of the moment, participants created a ring around the pregnant woman and her partner, both of whom were adorned in floral wreaths. The midwife, or sometimes the mother’s closest female friends, washed her feet and massaged them with cornmeal.80

The use of the Blessing Way in the Kootenays demonstrates local links both to radical American midwife Raven Lang, who was engaged in similar rites in California, and to the wider back-to-the-land interest in Aboriginal peoples and customs.81 A handwritten description of the ceremony, created as a guide and carefully decorated with a flower motif, speaks to the purposeful creation of alternative birthing culture with a spiritual inspiration: “About 10 years ago, this ceremony sprang up in our culture, as a kind of new age baby shower, but with a more intimate and powerful focus on the birthing family. This concurred with the general trend to embrace and create traditions as a way of understanding and celebrating changes or passages and events in our lives.”82

There is a clear connection between the creation of alternative collective and personal identities and the homebirth movement of the 1970s and 1980s in British Columbia’s Kootenay region. However, this is a complex story, perhaps best understood through the lens of consumption. As scholars in the field have noted, maternalism has always positioned itself as oppositional to the world of the marketplace, represented in this context by medical expertise and the institutions of state and medicine.83 Neo-traditional feminist—or rooted in a more diffuse set of alternative living practices—participants in back-to-the-land childbirth understood their quest to be about social relationships and creating new personal and collective ways of bringing the next generation into the world.

CONCLUSION

We were interested in taking more responsibility for ourselves and our lifestyle and how we were going to raise our children. How we were going to feed them. How we were going to live on the land. We had respect for the natural world and the primal nature of life. And giving birth is still a very primal process, rather than a cerebral one. It is not about doing it right or wrong.84

As Kootenay community midwife Barbara Ray makes apparent, the organic, social, and spatial environment was frequently evoked in homebirth narratives and constantly woven into aspects of the movement, from spiritual Blessing Ways and community birth quilts to childbirth education and the presentation of the female body in labour. Nature and place gave cohesion to this radical maternalist movement as it took shape and imparted personal and collective power to the practice of reclaiming birth in the Kootenays.

The story of counterculture homebirth in the Kootenays thus provides a case study of how back-to-the-land women embraced the living world, consciously seeking out a lifestyle mediated by nature and maternalism rather than technology and professionalism, and making real the feminist mantra of the era: “the personal is political.” By shifting childbirth from the medical/professional realm of the hospital to the natural/personal sphere of the counterculture homespace, the birthing mothers I interviewed were able to assert ownership of their bodies and claim an alternative identity as self-educated, resourceful people who were part of a community of like-minded individuals.

Midwife-assisted homebirth in the 1970s and 1980s therefore needs to be understood as a complex process of decolonization, relocation, re-education, and rediscovery. In the long valleys of the Kootenays homebirthing women drew on a wide set of cultural and social identities, resources, and capital, rejecting a biomedical model of childbirth in favour of a holistic approach that incorporated the natural alongside the communal, the relational, the female, and the spiritual. The production of the natural and reproduction of family and community were thus one and the same. Although the descriptor “female labour” takes on multiple meanings here, this work simultaneously situated women within the traditional maternal role and allowed them to radically transcend the lived experiences of their mothers by reclaiming childbirth and motherhood as female, political, and empowering.

notes

1 This project would not have been possible without funding from Associated Medical Services (Toronto). I would like to thank the following individuals for their help with the project and this paper: Lanny Beckman, Michele Billung-Meyer, Lara Campbell, Colin Coates, Sarah Gose, Christopher Hines, Jude Kornelson, Sarah Jane Swartz, and all the women that I interviewed, especially Abra Palumbo for her ongoing engagement with the project.

2 Pamela Nagley Stevenson, videotaped interview with the author, Winlaw, BC, 28 June 2004.

3 Over the latter nineteenth century, physicians launched a successful bid to exclude midwives and position themselves as the only legitimate birthing experts. See Leslie Biggs, “Rethinking the History of Midwifery in Canada,” in Reconceiving Midwifery, ed. Ivy Lyn Bourgeault, Cecila Benoit, and Robbie Davis-Floyd (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2004), 17–47; and Mike Saks, “Medicine and the Counter Culture,” in Medicine in the Twentieth Century, ed. Roger Cooter and John Pickstone (Amsterdam: Harwood, 2000), 113–23. On the shift to hospital birth and the rise of obstetrics, see Wendy Mitchinson, Giving Birth in Canada, 1900–1950 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2002).

4 For Canadian literature on these topics, see Brian Burtch, Trials of Labour: The Re-emergence of Midwifery (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1994); Sheryl Nestel, Obstructed Labour: Race and Gender in the Re-emergence of Midwifery (Vancouver: UBC Press, 2006); and Margaret MacDonald, At Work in the Field of Birth: Midwifery Narratives of Nature, Tradition and Home (Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press, 2007). For a comprehensive picture of the American scene, see Margot Edwards and Mary Waldorf, Reclaiming Birth: History and Heroines of American Childbirth Reform (New York: Crossing Press, 1984). Eleanor Barrington’s Midwifery Is Catching (Toronto: NC Press, 1984), a polemic designed to promote midwifery, is also an important historical document with an extensive section on the Kootenays.

5 The area’s unconventional orientation was reflected in its birth statistics: a 1980 federal study found that 8 percent of Kootenay births took place at home, compared with 1 or 2 percent elsewhere in the province. Cited in Barrington, Midwifery Is Catching, 87. Ina May Gaskin and her cadre of midwives worked on The Farm in rural Tennessee. Their work has recently been chronicled in the documentary Birth Story: Ina May Gaskin and the Farm Midwives, directed by Sara Lamm and Mary Wigmore (Los Angeles, 2012). For a history of The Farm, see Timothy Miller, The 60s Communes: Hippies and Beyond (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1999), 118–24. For a history of Lang and the Santa Cruz Birthing Center, see Edwards and Waldorf, Reclaiming Birth, 156–79.

6 Because homebirth was located in the family setting, and appears to have been primarily a heterosexual scene in the Kootenays during this period, men were clearly part of the picture. But the key issue that emerged through my research was the development of a female-controlled women-centred birthing system. It is hoped that future research will explore the sexual and gender dynamics of the homebirth movement.

7 In 2000 I conducted eight preliminary interviews in the Kootenays, and in 2004 I conducted twenty-nine videotaped interviews with women who had worked as “community” midwives and/or given birth at home during the 1970s and 1980s in the Kootenays, the southern Gulf Islands, and Vancouver. These are in the University of British Columbia Archives, Vancouver (hereafter UBC Archives), along with Abra Palumbo’s midwifery papers. The personal connections that I established with some of my research subjects preclude any pretense at objectivity. Complete scholarly detachment is impossible.

8 Theoretical works on social and cultural capital include Robert Putman, “Bowling Alone: America’s Declining Social Capital,” Journal of Democracy, 6, no. 1 (1995): 65–78; and Pierre Bourdieu, Practical Reason (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998).

9 Carolyn Merchant, “Reinventing Eden: Western Culture as a Recovery Narrative,” in Uncommon Ground: Rethinking the Human Place in Nature, ed. William Cronon (New York: W. W. Norton, 1996), 132–59.

10 Gregg Mitman, “In Search of Health: Landscape and Disease in American Environmental History,” Environmental History, 10, no. 2 (2005): 184–210.

11 See Burtch, Trials of Labour, 3–4. The legalities of homebirth were presented most strongly by Liz Tanner in recounting the hemorrhage that followed one homebirth. Diane Holt, Susan Stryck, Liz Tanner, and Don Tanner, videotaped interview with the author, Nelson, BC, 28 June 2004.

12 Aronsen neglects important social justice and radical health initiatives, but his book is a good introduction to the Vancouver scene—the centre of much of the BC action in the period. Lawrence Aronsen, City of Love and Revolution: Vancouver in the Sixties (Vancouver: New Star, 2011). For a national perspective, see Doug Owram, Born at the Right Time: A History of the Baby Boom Generation (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1996); and Myrna Kostash, Long Way from Home: The Story of the Sixties Generation in Canada (Toronto: James Lorimer, 1980).

13 Justine Brown, All Possible Worlds: Utopian Experiments in British Columbia (Vancouver: New Star, 1995); on British Columbia’s back-to-the-land movement, Terry Allan Simmons, “But We Must Cultivate Our Garden: Twentieth Century Pioneering in Rural British Columbia” (PhD diss., University of Minnesota, 1979); for studies dealing with other locales, Alan MacEachern, The Institute of Man and Resources: An Environmental Fable (Charlottetown, PEI: Island Studies, 2003); and Miller, The 60s Communes.

14 Mark Vonnegut, The Eden Express (New York; Praeger, 1976), 48. Other BC accounts of the back-to-the-land movement include Kenneth Brower, The Starship and the Canoe (New York: Bantam, 1978); and Feenie Ziner, Within This Wilderness (New York: W. W. Norton, 1978).

15 For a Canadian introduction to social movement theory, see Marie Hammond-Callaghan and Matthew Hayday, eds., Mobilizations, Protests and Engagements: Canadian Perspectives on Social Movements (Halifax, NS: Fernwood, 2008).

16 See the chapters by Janovicek and Rodgers in this collection.

17 On the American feminist health scene, see Morgan, Into Our Own Hands. Key feminist theorists from the period who wrote about women and birth include Ann Oakley, Women Confined: Towards a Sociology of Childbirth (Oxford: Martin Robertson, 1984); Adrienne Rich, Of Woman Born: Motherhood as Experience and Institution (London: Virago, 1977); Barbara Ehrenreich and Deidre English, Witches, Midwives, and Nurses: A History of Women Healers (New York: Feminist Press, 1973).

18 While naturist practices have a much longer Canadian history, public nudity was an important aspect of counterculture rebellion against mainstream morality. Linked to liberal sexual practices, dress, and hairstyles, nudity found local expression in a Nelson nudist commune of the late 1960s and in practices elsewhere such as nude sports events and the establishment of nude beaches. Lanny Beckman, personal communication, July 2012; John Davies, Brenda Davies, Elaine Davies, and Michael Davies, personal communication, June 2005; Aronsen, City of Love, 70.

19 The history of alternative medicine is still limited. See J. K. Crellin, R. R. Anderson, and J. T. H. Connor, eds., Alternative Health Care in Canada: Nineteenth- and Twentieth-Century Perspectives (Toronto: Canadian Scholar’s Press, 1997); Mike Saks, “Political and Historical Perspectives,” in Perspectives on Complementary and Alternative Medicine, ed. Tom Heller, Geraldine Lee-Treweek, Jeanne Katz, Julie Stone, and Sue Spurr (Abington, UK: Routledge, 2005), 59–82; Saks, “Medicine and the Counter Culture.”

20 Pat Armstrong’s biographical details come from Barrington, Midwifery Is Catching, 87–88; and field notes, November 2000, Nelson, BC.

21 My thoughts on the rural context have been stimulated by discussions of the English countryside presented in Paul Milbourne, ed., Revealing Rural “Others”: Representation, Power and Identity in the British Countryside (London: Pinter, 1997); and Keith Halfacree, “‘Back to the Land’? (Re)settlement as a Future for the Next Millennium,” in The New Countryside: Geographic Perspectives on Rural Change, ed. Kenneth B. Beesley, Hugh Millward, Brian Ilbery, and Lisa Harrington (Brandon, MB: Brandon University, 2003), 268–77.

22 Popular in the post–World War II era, but particularly in the 1960s, an A-frame house is designed in an inverted “V” shape, with a roof that extends to the ground.

23 Sarah Hardy and Caroline Wiedmer discuss these important and often contradictory geographies of the home and the ideologies that are at play in this space in “Introduction: Spaces of Motherhood,” in Motherhood and Space: Configurations of the Maternal through Politics, Home and the Body, ed. Sarah Hardy and Caroline Wiedmer (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), 1–14.

24 Allison M. Williams’s work on dying at home is most useful in theorizing homebirth in a locational context. Williams, “The Impact of Palliation on Familial Space: Home Space from the Perspective of Family Members Who Are Living (and Caring) for Dying Loved Ones at Home,” in Home/Bodies: Geographies of Self, Place, and Space, ed. Wendy Schissel (Calgary: University of Calgary Press, 2006), 99–120.

25 Bell hooks argues that the “homeplace” is a space from which alternatives can be tested and resistance to dominant ways of seeing can be established, providing self-dignity for those involved; see bell hooks and Cornel West, Breaking Bread: Insurgent Black Intellectual Life (Toronto: Between the Lines, 1991).

26 Margaret MacDonald notes the importance of traditional historical images of midwives within the Canadian midwifery movement. MacDonald, “Tradition as a Political Symbol in the New Midwifery in Canada,” in Bourgeault, Benoit, and Davis-Floyd, Reconceiving Midwifery, 46–66.

27 Stevenson, interview.

28 Bennett M. Berger makes this point, arguing that the presence of the father and other children and the exclusion of the physician symbolized that the child belongs to the family, not the state. Berger, The Survival of a Counterculture: Ideological Work and Everyday Life among Rural Communards (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1981), 54.

29 Veronica Strong-Boag, “Home Dreams: Women and the Suburban Experiment in Canada, 1945–60,” Canadian Historical Review 72, no. 4 (1991): 471–504.

30 Elaine Tyler May, Homeward Bound: American Families in the Cold War Era (New York: Basic, 1988), 172.

31 Leslie M. Campos, Lisa Farr, Irma Mende, and Lynnda Moore, videotaped interview with the author, Slocan, BC, 27 June 2004.

32 Kostash argues that “What they [the back-to-the-landers] tended to construct instead was a nostalgic throwback to the social organization of the frontier, where pre-industrialized society was speciously secured in the servitude of women” (Long Way from Home, 121).

33 Gretchen Lemke-Santangelo, Daughters of Aquarius: Women of the Sixties Counterculture (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2009), 57–58, 59.

34 Laurel Robertson, Carol Flinders, and Bronwyn Godfrey, Laurel’s Kitchen: A Handbook for Vegetarian Cookery and Nutrition (Tetluma, CA: Nilgiry, 1976); Wendy Bender, Earth Market Cookbook: Recipes for a Simple Life (Sooke, BC: Fireweed, 1978).

35 Warren Belasco, “Food and the Counterculture: A Story of Bread and Politics,” in The Cultural Politics of Food and Eating: A Reader, ed. James L. Watson and Melissa L. Caldwell (Oxford: Blackwell, 2005), 217–34.

36 Lemke-Santangelo sets home birth in this context, seeing midwives as the ones who took “private” knowledge public (Daughters of Aquarius, 173).

37 Abra Palumbo, videotaped interview with the author, Black Creek, BC, 9 July 2004. See Megan J. Davies, “La renaissance des sages-femmes dans la région de Kootenay en Colombie-Britannique, 1970–1990,” in L’incontournable caste des femmes: Histoire des services de soins de santé au Québec et au Canada, ed. Marie-Claude Thifault (Ottawa: University of Ottawa Press, 2012); and MacDonald, At Work in the Field, 131.

38 Saks, “Political and Historical Perspectives,” 59–82.

39 Camille Bush, videotaped interview with the author, Vancouver, 13 July 2004.

40 Ibid.

41 Pat Armstrong, interview with the author, Nelson, BC, November 2000.

42 Birth albums, in the private collection of Carolyn deMarco.

43 Raven Lang, The Birth Book (Ben Lomond, CA: Genesis, 1972); Cheryl Anderson, Free Delivery (Vancouver: n.p., 1975); Ina May Gaskin, Spiritual Midwifery (Summertown, TN: Book Publishing Company, 1972). Anderson’s book is a particularly good illustration of this point.

44 Marguerite S. Shaffer, “On the Environmental Nude,” Environmental History 13, no. 1 (2008): 126–39.

45 Ilene Bell, article in Maternal Health News (Vancouver) 8, no. 3 (1983).

46 For an excellent discussion of maternalism and its connections with economic and political issues and cultures of female esteem and honour, see Rebecca Jo Plant and Marian van der Klein, “Introduction: A New Generation of Scholars on Maternalism,” in Maternalism Reconsidered: Motherhood, Welfare and Social Policy in the Twentieth Century, ed. Marian van der Klein, Rebecca Jo Plant, Nichole Sanders, and Lori R. Weintrob (New York: Berghahn, 2012), 1–21.

47 Campos et al., interview.

48 Ellie Kremler, interview with the author, Kaslo, BC, 30 June 2004.

49 Campos et al., interview.

50 Saks identifies personal responsibility as a central aspect of the alternative health field in the late twentieth century (“Medicine and the Counter Culture,” 113–23). Lemke-Santangelo places such themes as reconnecting with nature, self-realization, and spiritual growth in the broader context of the counterculture (Daughters of Aquarius, 56–57).

51 Arthur W. Frank, The Wounded Storyteller: Body, Illness, and Ethics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995).

52 Prenatal class handouts, personal papers of Abra Palumbo, UBC Archives.

53 Barrington, Midwifery Is Catching, 88.

54 Barbara Ray, videotaped interview with the author, Victoria, BC, 10 July 2004.

55 Glenda Patterson and Celestiana Hart, interview with the author, Nelson, BC, 2000. Pat Armstrong explicitly stated that Our Bodies/Ourselves, the seminal North American feminist health text, was not on her reading list. Armstrong, interview. As MacDonald points out in her work on Ontario midwives, they share the beliefs that birth should be a profound female life-event; midwifery care should be low-intervention, personalized, and woman-centred; and women should “give birth safely with power and dignity.” MacDonald, “Tradition as a Political Symbol,” 53.

56 Armstrong, interview.

57 Susan Vetrano, Liz Tanner, and Diane Holt, interview with the author, Nelson, BC, November 2000.

58 Morgan, Into Our Own Hands, 6. Other illustrations of the democraticization of expert knowledge in this period include the People’s Law School in Vancouver and the establishment of crisis phone lines, hospice services, and so on.

59 Dr. deMarco came to the Kootenays in 1975; reading Raven Lang’s Birth Book on her journey west, deMarco decided to attend homebirths and became a key mentor for the Kootenay midwives. Barrington, Midwifery Is Catching, 86–93. DeMarco is featured in the 1993 National Film Board documentary Born at Home.

60 Bush, interview.

61 Gaskin, Spiritual Midwifery.

62 Responsible Home-Centred Childbirth (Kootenay Childbirth Counselling Centre, n.d.). The manual was typed out by Abra Palumbo and illustrated by Patti Strom. Barbara Ray, videotaped interview with the author, Victoria, BC, 7 July 2004. For an analysis of how manuals worked in another counterculture community, see Joan Cross, “Capitalism and Its Discontents: Back-to-the-Lander and Freegan Foodways in Rural Oregon” Food and Foodways, 17, no. 2 (2009): 64.

63 Ray, interview, 7 July 2004.

64 Responsible Home-Centred Childbirth, unpaginated [at p. 65]. Diane Hold, Liz Tanner, and Susan Vetrano recalled with some amusement their efforts to sterilize linens (which they were meant to repeat every five days if the baby was late) inside a wood-burning stove—often with predictable results! Vetrano, Tanner, and Holt, interview.

65 Kremler, interview.

66 Lisa Farr also had Palumbo as a midwife. Campos et al., interview.

67 Barrington notes this in Midwifery Is Catching, 90.

68 Holt, Stryck, Tanner, and Tanner, interview.

69 Ray, interview, 10 July 2004. None of the Kootenay practitioners I interviewed made a living from their craft. Abra Palumbo was paid fifty dollars for a birth when she began in 1976, an amount that had increased to two hundred dollars by 1985. As a result, her family finances depended on her husband’s teaching income. Palumbo, interview. Camille Bush also recalled getting fifty dollars for a birth. Bush, interview.

70 Ilene Bell, videotaped interview with the author, Nelson, BC, 29 June 2004.

71 Here I am referencing Belasco’s work on counterculture food and the stress put on “natural” food prepared through traditional methods (“Food and the Counterculture,” 221).

72 Ray, interview, 10 July 2004.

73 Bush, interview.

74 Palumbo, interview; Stevenson, interview. I drank tea from that pot when I visited Abra the following year.

75 Ilene Bell, email communication with the author, 10 April 2009.

76 Ibid.

77 Barrington, Midwifery Is Catching, 90; Palumbo, interview.

78 Pamela Klassen, “Procreating Women and Religion: The Politics of Spirituality, Healing, and Childbirth in America,” in Religion and Healing in America, ed. Linda Barnes and Susan Sered (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003).

79 Siegfried Noetstaller, photographer, “Mothers and Babes Participated in a ‘Blessingway Ceremony,’” Nelson Daily News, 29 March 1984, 6.

80 This description is gathered from the following sources: Ray, interview, 10 July 2004; Palumbo, interview; Stevenson, interview; Kremler, interview; “The Blessing Way Ceremony,” handwritten and hand-decorated description, n.d., personal papers of Abra Palumbo, UBC Archives; Barrington, Midwifery Is Catching, 91.

81 Abra Palumbo thought that Patti Strom might have brought the idea of the Blessing Way to the Kootenays, but the connection she suggests with Raven Lang is also likely. Abra Palumbo, letter to the author, 2 June 2005. By the late 1970s, Lang was teaching the ritual to women attending the Institute for Feminine Arts in California. Edwards and Waldorf, Reclaiming Birth, 187–88. This is likely a case of counterculture adherents playing with something symbolically labeled “Indian,” without having any real connection with Indigenous peoples, as Philip Deloria explores in his useful essay, “Counterculture Indians and the New Age,” in Imagine Nation: The American Counterculture of the 1960s and ’70s, ed. Peter Braunstein and Michael William Doyle (New York: Routledge, 2002), 159–88. Geographer Cole Harris, himself from this area, points out that Indigenous peoples of the Slocan Lake region were decimated by infectious disease brought by the colonizing powers and thus rendered invisible to future incomers, including his own family. Similarly, counterculture migrants of the 1970s and 1980s would likely have been unaware of an Indigenous presence in the area. Cole Harris, The Resettlement of British Columbia: Essays on Colonialism and Geographical Change (Vancouver: UBC Press, 1997), xvi.

82 “The Blessing Way Ceremony,” UBC Archives.

83 Janelle S. Taylor, “Introduction,” in Consuming Motherhood, ed. Janelle S. Taylor, Linda L. Layne, and Danielle F. Wozniak (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2004), 1–18.

84 Ray, interview, 10 July 2004.