Guest post for Baby Yams, by Amy Barcenas, Kah-mi-wah-sik Ki-kah-wi-no ahs-kiy (“Pretty Mother Earth Woman”), Chippewa Cree, Founder of Yellowtail Lactation Consultants and the Bitterroot Doula Collective 

I don’t do this work for trophies. I do it because I saw a need for our women to be heard, understood, and supported, and for our voices to finally be counted in the places that decide how mothers and babies are cared for. 

We are often miscounted. Labeled as “other.” That is a hard thing to carry when you come from the first peoples of this country, whose customs, traditions, and culture should have always had a place in hospitals and institutions. 

Simply being Native doesn’t automatically give someone the knowing it takes to walk beside our mothers. What does is lived experience. The people best equipped to support our families through the hardest parts of their journey are often the ones who have walked through those same fires themselves, not just people with a credential on the wall. That is what I want this post to hold up: the people doing this work with real lived experience, the organizations choosing to lift each other up instead of competing for the same small pool of funding, and the grassroots workers, often unfunded and unseen, who are holding this whole thing together while working full time, going to school, and building their credentials with almost nothing behind them. 

Traditions That Were Never Meant to Be Erased 

Some of our traditions have become more visible in recent years, though usually in a westernized, commercialized form. Placenta encapsulation has become popular, but our reasons for saving the placenta are different. In our way, the placenta is buried ceremonially, connecting the baby to the earth so they will always find their way home and never forget where they came from. It is the same with the belly button. We say things like “my belly button is buried in Montana,” even if we were born somewhere else. It is a way of marking where you belong. 

I am a Cree woman, and in nêhiyawêwin, our language, the belly button, nitisiy, is understood as a sacred anchor that ties a person to their mother, their ancestors, their family, and the land. Even the way we introduce ourselves carries this. Nitsiyihkâson, the phrase for “my name is,” roots back to nitisiy itself. Our identity is bound up in that first vital connection from the very beginning. 

This practice isn’t unique to my tribe. In Navajo tradition, for example, burying the placenta and umbilical cord is also sacred, done to bind the child to their ancestral homelands, ensure they will always return home, and protect their wellbeing and future. I am not Navajo, but Colorado is home to a large number of Navajo families, and I think it matters to name that this is something many of our nations carry in our own ways. It is one more reason our voices, plural and different from each other, need real space in how mothers and babies are cared for. 

My belly button is buried in Montana, though I was born in Billings and raised in Great Falls, where I went to kindergarten and elementary school at Longfellow, alongside a lot of other Native children. Some of my classmates were Blackfeet, some were from Fort Peck, and we were all treated the same by the school. If there was ever any division, I believe it came from the way some parents raised their children to see us, not from the school itself. We did have an Indian Club, led by Sandy Houle, our Native Ed teacher, who met with us after school. She was so dedicated to us that she even temporarily fostered some of us Native kids herself. But most of what I learned came from my family, at home, around the table. That was where our teachings lived. 

I remember attending a giveaway dance with my mother on Hill 57, held inside someone’s house because so many of our ceremonies were outlawed for so long. It happened in winter. I watched as relatives danced with a gift held behind their back, and when the music stopped, they presented it. Mostly blankets and comfort items, things people needed before the hard winter came. There was always food too, wojapi, which is boiled berries, along with stews and the famous Mac soup. I asked my mom once what the food was, and she told me it was spirit food. I still think about that. My people learned to make something out of whatever rations they were given. Mac soup, macaroni with a little ground beef and tomato, or just the macaroni when there wasn’t money for meat, is still one of my favorite foods. My grandma also made bannock, our Cree bread, potato soup, and things with rhubarb, which isn’t even native to Montana but took root after settlers arrived, and we would pick it walking between family houses. 

That was how we lived. We walked from house to house to stay connected, to see what was on the stove, to sit at the table if the adults allowed it. Nobody was ever turned away. 

I watched my grandma dance at powwows with her shawl on her shoulders, carrying herself with so much pride, and that taught me how to carry myself too. My grandpa was a drummer and singer, and he would put our names into his songs. He called me “the kind one.” Even as children we were taught not to fight over food, to share what we had, to be kind to strangers, to give away something we loved if we knew someone else needed or would delight in it more. That spirit of giving has stayed with me my whole life, even when it isn’t returned. 

What Shaped Me 

My path here was not gentle. I grew up in Montana, a place people now see on television as scenic and peaceful, but for our people it has long been something else. Our men have been detained and sentenced at rates that don’t match our white counterparts, a pattern with deep roots in our history. Our women and girls go missing, part of the ongoing crisis of missing and murdered Indigenous women that has touched our communities for generations. 

My family experienced real loss and real hardship growing up, the kind many Native families in Montana know too well. I became a young mother, navigating homelessness and instability during a time when a lot of my family was going through their own struggles. Being half Mexican and half Chippewa Cree, I often felt like I was walking a fence between two cultures. My dad raised us in Montana, away from his side of the family, though we visited every summer, and my grandmother cooked tortillas and beans and spoke Spanish that I didn’t learn until much later, when I taught myself as an adult so I could use it in community health work. 

By the time I was ten, I was already helping raise the people around me. I took care of my younger siblings, checked in on my sister and her kids, and sometimes helped grown relatives through their own hard seasons. I understood early how heavy the weight of motherhood was in our community, how many of our mothers carried it largely alone, on very little. Looking back, I see how strong those women actually were. My mother stressed the importance of keeping a clean home no matter how poor we were, something that has stayed with me, even as I’ve had to learn balance so I could stay present with my own kids instead of chasing perfection. You cannot go out and serve your community if your own house isn’t in order. 

I stayed with my Aunt Babes and my Grandma Madeline at different points, and my grandma often took in other kids who needed somewhere to be, even more than she took me in. Giving them my clothes never felt like a sacrifice. It felt like something I already knew how to do. 

The Work I Carry Now 

I am thankful my mother breastfed me until I was five. I’m thankful for my health and my mind to this day because of it. She had eleven children. I was the sixth. She sacrificed her body and so much of her life to get me here, so that I could take the baton and carry it to the next generation.

People sometimes call me a one woman band. I don’t see it that way. I stand with my ancestors behind me, my grandmothers, my mother, my sisters, and everyone before them who fought the same systems, many of whom never lived to see the end of the poverty or the tragedy that came from being torn from their homes. That journey back is so hard, because so much of our identity was meant to be taught at the table, in community, together. We were never meant to walk it alone. 

I started showing up at powwows with a booth and my crocheted “boobies,” offering hydration support and resources to nursing mothers, along with whatever I had been given the ability to provide, often through my own family. My daughters, who have given me four grandchildren, have amazed me with how independent and capable they are, and I’m so glad they’ve carried forward what I taught them. Together we’ve supplied diapers, wipes, pads, and baby gear. When I see things on sale, I buy them out of pocket and save them for the next booth. It isn’t just free stuff. It’s an offering, from my spirit, from my people, from this tradition that I get to keep alive. 

I have learned to treat the ideas that come to me not as ideas, but as visions given to me by Creator to carry out. Sometimes I have no idea how I’m going to do it. It always happens anyway. 

Through my seat on the tribal early childhood committee, we were able to help put on the first ever Indigenous Lactation Counselor training in Colorado, with Baby Yams as one of our sponsors, generously supporting quilts we gave away to the community in that same spirit. I couldn’t have done it without the women who supported that mission, including Kimberly Moore Salas and Camie Jae Goldhammer, who have poured their hearts into this training and become something like celebrities in Indian Country for the work they’ve done nationwide. Places like Albuquerque already have strong support and cultural representation, organizations like Changing Woman Initiative are doing beautiful work there. What still needs attention is the stretch of small towns in between, the corridor between Albuquerque and Denver, where mothers are more isolated and that kind of support hasn’t reached yet. We can connect virtually, but nothing replaces being a good relative in person, walking beside someone with the kind of lived understanding that being Native alone doesn’t automatically give you. 

Working Together Instead of Working Alone 

None of this happened because one organization did it by itself. It happened because people chose to lift each other up instead of guarding their piece of the pie. Baby Yams sponsoring quilts, the tribal early childhood committee opening the door for the training, trainers like Kimberly Moore Salas and Camie Jae Goldhammer showing up to pour their expertise into a new cohort of counselors, sponsors like Boppy, Cheekbone Beauty, and the Colorado Department of Early Childhood stepping in, this only worked because everyone showed up in a spirit of collaboration rather than competition. 

Our communities cannot afford for the organizations serving them to work in silos, quietly competing for the same small grants while mothers in the small towns between Albuquerque and Denver go without support. There is more than enough need to go around. What we need is more organizations willing to link arms instead of guard territory. 

And within that circle, I want to name something plainly. Some of the people doing this work are backed by institutions and grant funding. Others are not. Yellowtail Lactation Consultants is a grassroots effort, built by me as a volunteer community doula and community lactation counselor, with no institutional backing behind it. I am doing this while working, while going to school, while pursuing my IBCLC certification, and while continuing my work as a community health worker, largely on my own time and often out of my own pocket. Grassroots workers like me are frequently the first ones a mother meets, and the last ones with a seat at the funding table. If we are serious about rebuilding the village, that has to change. The organizations with resources need to keep reaching down and pulling the grassroots workers up alongside them, the way Baby Yams and this training did for me. 

It was hard to grow up and keep a good head on my shoulders through everything I faced. People look at me sitting on a board and would never guess that behind the turtleneck is a girl who survived all of this. My story isn’t unique in my community, though it is becoming rarer, as more of our elders complete their journeys and more of our ways are at risk of being lost. It is a heavy responsibility to now be the one carrying those teachings forward. But it all starts at home. It starts with picking up your traditions, never forgetting where you came from, and taking your place in the circle of life beside your ancestors, no matter how long or painful the struggle has been. 

This work takes everything, spirit, heart, and body. There is real physical labor in the carrying, the organizing, the thousands of donated hours. That labor is my offering back. 

I simply pray I never lose my spirit or my heart while I do it. 

This post is dedicated to Madeline Mosney Gardipee, Marlene Faye Gardipee, Francina Lynn Lopez, and Manuela Lopez, the women who sit around the fire in the spirit world, smudging and watching over me. To my grandfather, Joseph Gardipee. To my brother, Geronimo Crazy Horse Lopez, who stands over six feet tall there and cheers me on. And to my son, Maximilian Gonzalez-Lopez, who left before his time. I hope I am making you all proud.