 Hello, everyone. Again, I'm Carleen. Thank you and we're so excited to hear your presentation so I'd like to start off by First welcoming and then introducing Dr. Carleen Wilson Mitchell Carleen has practiced midwifery in the US and Canada since 1992 including clinics birth centers and hospitals in Florida, North Carolina, Georgia, Northern Quebec and Ontario She has taught in the MEP at Ryerson University since 2008 She's a member of the ACNM midwives of color committee her doctoral studies placed a heavy emphasis on midwifery education and her capstone project focused on perceptions of Jamaican midwives of barriers to delivery of respectful maternity care Some of the findings of this research and form her current philosophy of teaching and equity research Carleen's interest in international health and health policy stems from years of working with international clients nursing in nursing and midwifery She has worked in with Tanzanian and Zambian midwives and participated in volunteer work in Jamaica, Tanzania and Burundi She has published articles on strategies for infusing diversity equity and inclusion into clinical learning as well as employing an Intellectual partnership model for teaching under the auspices of CAM Global Carleen has worked with the South Sudanese midwives to develop a tutor's manual to deliver their newly developed three-year midwifery diploma curriculum among students who have experienced the aftermath of civil unrest and war Her areas of research include perinatal male outcomes of refugee and migrant women and newborns Ryerson Center for Immigration and Settlement and Places hold memories She says that places hold memories of suffering and resilience and hope Places are the object of our movements in migration for a better life and this presentation will involve the telling of migration stories It'll be edgy. It's intended to help us reflect and to learn from the past and the present It is a herstory of Canadian midwives of color and we should all listen at our own risk discretion is advised Which only? Provokes me to be more interested to listen Carleen. Take it away. We're so Thank you so much. Nisa. I'm going to ask you to please advance the slides for me because somehow I'm not sure whether I have the ability to do that I'm using two devices. If one doesn't work the next one succeeds. That's resilience and midwives know how to do that It's such a pleasure to be with you here. I'm representing my whole team In fact, it's a very interdisciplinary team of historians archivists filmmakers and midwifery students and and practicing midwives and Community partners and so I'm representing them here today And I'm so grateful for Nisa. We actually were in the same doctor of nursing practice program at Frontier Nursing University So it is really come. I think it's karma. It's just, you know, destiny that we should be here today presenting this information this Project and I congratulate everyone and just really appreciate everyone for being here Because it will challenge all of us including myself some of the information I'm going to be sharing. We could go to the next slide, please Okay What I'm going to talk about today is the whole idea of equal access to health care to services resources equal access to midwifery education equal access because we are all human beings and a lot of us have been looking at respectful maternity care and respectful teaching of midwifery care and respectful ways of working in midwifery practices In terms of respect, but in Latin America where a lot of my respectful maternity care is now being done They conceptualize this as the humanization of birth and in fact, it really problematizes me and really challenges me to rethink my The the notions that I have about teaching about how we interact with people and how some of the the structures and systems and history in Our world and society has actually served to dehumanize people and that dehumanization is really the Foundation of a lot of the inequities that we see and these hierarchies that cause oppression So I'll talk about some of the parallels not only in the midwifery history in Canada But what was going on in the context and how it almost is a parallel of what's still going on today in midwifery? Not only in Canada, but around the world and so we're really going to be self-reflective I'm going to talk about how midwives Are positioned some of the midwives become storytellers and some of their clients and their descendants and the descendants of the babies they caught are some of those storytellers and some of the members of the stakeholders and our members of our team and why it is so interdisciplinary why it is crossing boundaries of having intellectual partnerships with even the students we work with and our new methodologies that might be foreign to midwifery, but are very much part of the humanities and Social justice research and we'll analyze some of the preliminary findings This is a really living project that we hope will go on for decades to come the information of the storytelling will continue Long after I've retired and and just what are the ways going forward? What do we what part do we have to play as midwives as students as? Social activists in the way going forward. This is a beautiful representation of birth in Canada at the turn of the 20th century so 1800s 1900s this is a birthing stool and this photo is At the grace and we give thanks to the Amherst Freedom Museum That really gives a little picture of some of the artifacts that we hope to highlight and showcase in our very multimedia way of transmitting the information next slide, please So if we look at where we are today 2021 what is going on in this world that we're in well We first of all have had an invasion by a tiny Microscopic less than five to ten microns in diameter Invader that has affected all of us. It's affected commerce travel Healthcare Education it has affected every sector in our society and it is a war and it came in as an air force because it's airborne and And also, you know by transmission with with all kinds of vectors Then the second wave came in You know, we have this economic crisis and political crisis Amongst us it has caused the black lives matter the need to matter The outcry against the violence that has been going on in our communities with vulnerable populations It's not just affected the United States. It's affected Canada. It's affected the world and We are reeling with it. I know my students are reeling with it We have had to really look carefully at every method that we use for teaching and looking at structural and systematic Racism that is embedded even in our language in our way of Representing our teaching materials and the way we look at midwifery learning. So the second wave has hit us You know in terms of an army, you know, it the army maybe didn't come to our Parliament buildings or our Congress or our Washington, but it is coming to our doorstep It's affecting our students when they go into placements and they're told no I don't want you as a midwifery student working with me because I don't like your kind and I don't trust you So yes, it's at our doorstep. Then the third wave came in our next-door neighbors Even those of our colleagues amongst us who might feel that really Secretly they have ideas of supremacy or inequity that surprise us In fact, it might surprise us in Canada that one of our neighbors a registered nurse would go all the way down to Washington to protest and to be a participant in the crowd that Ended up having five innocent people die Who would imagine who would imagine that even midwifery is so Problematizing and so risky that a group of Afghanistan midwifery students Largely young girls young women who were being taught how to read and write had have gainful employment as midwifery You know practitioners in the community. They were considered so dangerous that someone would consider bombing their school What is so dangerous about some young girls and boys who are getting This is really a Time of a secret wave that is is heading to us If we were allowed to see the animation on this you would see some birds migrating from Africa coming to North America And this begins the story of birth, but that story of birth There is also some violent things going on some things that were happening Secretly and some things that were happening openly and it felt like a war to some of the victims And so we can go on to the next slide in other words things haven't changed very much between 1800 and the early 1900s To the 21st century. So I'm talking about Canada What happened and what were the midwives in Canada in the 1800s and early 1900s doing? Where did they come from and why were they there? Well, there were a number of different kinds of midwives The the narrative that we currently have in Canadian history and in midwifery history Makes you think that most of the midwives came from Europe They were primarily not racialized but of the white Anglo-Saxon majority and that in fact There were no respected or valued Practitioners that came with the immigrants and the very first refugees that came to Canada So there's very first refugees were runaway slaves many who came with the Underground Railroad Railroad was the journey truth and Some who came as new immigrants to Canada who maybe were recruited from Canada in the late 1890s They were recruited to Canada from Grenada Barbados many of the former British colonies actually came to Canada as nurses and midwives some of them after much hard work and Sometimes recredentialing even though their British passports and their British exams were exactly the same as their British counterparts in Europe they had to often revalidate and be able to take on positions to Do what we would consider of surgical nursing or Eventually by the 1950s 1960s They were allowed to practice as midwives in some of the hospitals but not all and certainly we see a large portion of these folks coming to The eastern coast of Canada the Atlantic provinces. So we're thinking of Newfoundland Halifax and there are still very strong African-Canadian communities there. There were also in other parts of Canada other Racialized immigrants that were coming some of them when times got hard like during the Second World War We're actually placed in internment camps as the Japanese Canadians were for fear that they might be Subversive or dangerous and when they were there in de facto segregated internment camps and having medical apartheid They would take care of their own. We don't hear their stories Likewise, we don't really hear the stories of the African Canadians or the South Asian Canadians and the many other Communities for example the Sikh communities that were in northern British Columbia But we have started to dig and tell the stories. So Canada was seen as a safe haven Runaway slaves who came as the first refugees those coming for a better way of life and coming from the Caribbean or Coming from as Canadian settlers who are coming to Canada in the eight late 1800s they were free and they were able to travel leave their their Property possessions farms in the Midwest of the United States to cross the border and come up into Alberta Saskatchewan Some came as workers from South Asia and so on but at the beginning of our project. We focused on sampling a small group Which was within the African Canadian community and then in the future. We'll look at the other communities So the next slide please. So there were stories of people Migrating up and these stories are very varied We would think it was a safe place to come to have a new life to start all over again to work hard To want to share in the wealth and these folks call themselves in some cases black settlers. That's what they call themselves or black pioneers They were coming to till the the ground and it was hard work, but many who came as Slaves for example in the 1800s that came to Canada thought they were coming to safety But in Canada in which slavery actually did continue for many years They were stigmatized and there is the story of Marie Joseph Angelique from Quebec who is Was in a French-speaking province and actually was Wrongly convicted tortured and hung in in Montreal So even though the they were fleeing for safety Canada didn't have a pristine reputation For necessarily not having hierarchies. There were hierarchies. There was industrialization And so getting products and getting goods and services Completed in a timely manner meant that people were less important just as it was industrialization all over the world Colonization and dehumanization next slide, please and it's interesting females are often Considered cherished vulnerable should be protected, you know if the Titanic was going down You make sure the women and children get into the boats first in Canada at the time if you were Block you weren't necessarily considered needing protection or or support or advocacy you were seen as dangerous as well So we look at sojourner truth and just if you wanted to go to that website And we can always make this available to you later There was a beautiful dance that I had here a video of the journey to freedom and the hope and the Aspiration of running away from hardship running away from discrimination running away from slavery running away from Times where you were physically brought to places without your consent to try to have a land of freedom in Canada And that's was what propelled people to come and when they came as many might have seen the book of Negroes that film or read the the novel of Lawrence Hill that this actually was a Matter of taking your midwives with you and they were trusted often apprenticeship trained and valued Members of society who were well respected. We can go to the next slide, please So that was a photograph of sojourner truth in the 1800s up until the 1940s or so If you look at Western Canada, this was the case They they saw advertisements in newspapers and we started to look through the archives of the old newspapers and found that there Were big ads encouraging people to come and settle the land They were a little bit surprised when these people came and they were black They expected white settlers to come but these were folks who had left everything and brought all their possessions with them Did work hard settle the land became part of the community and many of them We have stories of the midwives and we even have one of our team members now who is the descendant of one of those midwives and Lives and works as a midwife in Alberta the next slide, please Okay, first to go to the next slide If it does work I think our next flight slide probably just talks about some of the the midwives one of them was named Betty and Just stories of them being trusted in those days You used horse and buggy, but not everyone had access to a horse and buggy having horse and buggy meant you were actually quite Well-positioned and financially stable and what happened is the community is often shared resources So if one person had a horse and buggy or eventually in the early, you know 20th century when you had a vehicle like a pickup truck You would make sure that if the midwife got news of a birth and some of these communities were not within walking distance Some of them were but those that were not within walking distance Someone would give word to the midwife They would be driving her off to the birth at the other end of that community The midwife would stay there for a couple of days and look after the newborn teach if it was a primate Gravita teach that new mother how to care for her newborn And then would return this midwife would return back to their own family and this is any time of the day or night any season whether it was in the bitter cold with the snowstorms and Difficult to navigate roads. You know, these were unpaved roads in many cases This was pretty much the story all across Canada whether it was in the prairies where there is a lot of flatland and growing wheat and Corn and things like that or whether it was on the east coast close to the Atlantic Ocean where you have large fishing communities and Where you know, there was a lot of transport, you know to Europe and so on so those kinds of industries were being supported there or whether it was in Ontario in areas like Aurelia or the Grey Bruce area that There was a lot of farming community there as well and the traditions that develop there So these are families and communities that were well connected that helped each other They were, you know, primarily poor to lower middle class and and they would share resources to survive They were quite resilient and creative many of the stories of the physicians That had supervision over that particular area these physicians either because they weren't allowed to or didn't have the resources to They did not go into these black neighborhoods to catch babies So it was very segregated in those days in terms of work in terms of where you were allowed to shop and have services and resources But the physicians did value and really collaborate greatly with these midwives and if someone had a postpartum hemorrhage or there was Spontaneous abortion or perhaps even someone's attempt at an unsupervised therapeutic abortion Was at close to death many times these midwives would you know find these people and would get them transported to the hospital to be cared for and it would be a life-saving kind of a transfer of of care So it was important for that communication to be going on between the physicians even if the physicians weren't going into the communities they certainly Accepted transfers of care, but the midwives themselves were not allowed to practice inside those hospitals They might sit on the back stoop of the hospital. These are the stories. I heard in Nova Scotia and Someone might give them a cup of tea or you know a sandwich, but they wouldn't be allowed to come inside the hospital They weren't permitted to either come inside and eat in the cafeteria or to certainly care for their clients What happened when? Healthcare moved from the community all around in North America and around 1910 We started to see a move into the hospitals and hospitals were primarily physician dominated as they continue to be today in North America and Once education moved away from the apprentice model and started to be hospital based learning And then eventually university based learning Unfortunately, many of the new immigrants and racialized peoples were excluded from those educational opportunities and Their livelihood their ability to transfer Cultural knowledge and their ability to care for their community members and culturally appropriate and sensitive ways was lost Because they were going into the hospitals and not necessarily having their own midwives care for them Thank you, Nisa. It looks as though we got control of the slides again. So it looks as though here in this picture. This is Just an interesting story of one of the the American you know Highway women and You know, it's interesting. Some of our our students today Probably feel the same way that the midwives felt that they weren't welcomed in the hospitals And they weren't welcomed necessarily when they left the United States to come to Canada in Response to the ads that you could have free land and you could settle the land You'd expect they would be welcomed, but they were not so they were seeking support allyship empathy humanization And instead it almost felt as though somebody had a gun to their heads like we didn't expect you Why are you here next slide, please? So here's an ad that came from one of the newspapers in Alberta Edmonton, which is one of the ten provinces in Canada and It shows a very prominent woman in the community protesting that all of these black settlers and immigrants are coming to Canada and it's almost like You know an invasion it feels like or like an epidemic of Black people coming we thought when we were asking for nurses and midwives that they would all be looking like us and they look Different and it seemed a little bit intimidating and folks felt vulnerable that people were coming how Similar is this to the current immigration? Challenges that folks have throughout the world whether it's in Europe or whether it's across the border in the United States as Latin American Refugees are trying to claim asylum and are not welcomed. So we see these same kind of issues going on as the Middle East is causing unrest and the Syrian refugees the refugees from from northern northern Pakistan and Similar, you know Tibetan folks as well the next slide, please One of the midwifery students on our team and we have an interesting team of People of colored colors and allies So we have black brown and white midwifery students all interested in Understanding the history and what one of our students has said is black health care providers and child-bearing people in Canada remain disenfranchised due to long-term systemic gendered racism and colonization Black midwives working among black communities have been guiding lights through adversity Advocating for their communities human rights. So wherever we have looked throughout The world and certainly the ICM definition of the midwife bears this out We've seen midwives as advocates and by virtue of supporting clients and families their role is Political it is a political act to be a midwife Next slide, please. I hope I'm doing okay for time. How am I doing for time by the way, Nisa? I think we are okay. I don't know the total number of slides. There are 26 slides. I believe Yes, great. So I'm just giving a little bit of background and this might be a little bit repetitive of me Maddie Mays is one of the black pioneer midwives and as I said, they call themselves black pioneers and Canada the indigenous midwives and indigenous community use the word settlers Because they are the first nations and their land was forcibly taken away from them and we like to honor them So they don't like the the term pioneer, but we're using the terms that the the storytellers and the midwives used for themselves to self-identify so the first refugees in Canada were these runaway slaves and then eventually as medicalization of birth occurred they were excluded little by little through this systemic structural Exclusion process and so many of those families were stripped of their culture and community and kinship and especially the tradition surrounding birth and One of the studies I did a few years ago with one of my students really attested to a feeling of loss loss of birth culture loss of traditions and the bereavement and grieving that goes with those losses So we see that they're they're intersecting oppressions that even today are affecting Families of color and particularly specifically black families Next slide, please So as I said our project is to look at all racialized immigrant and refugee populations We just happen to start with the African Canadian population and looking at their history So we're looking at a small sample for the purposes of the seed grants that we've received for external funding But we eventually plan to look at the South Asian East Asian Middle Eastern and all peoples of color and and their history We still don't know enough about the Latin American Canadians and you know, we know of the current picture from, you know, the 20th century, but we don't know about the 19th century whether There is another there's another story to be told there Next slide, please Some of our stakeholders and partners are the people who hold some of this knowledge So the Ontario Heritage Trust, Owen Sound Emancipation Day committee the Africaville Museum is a very strong ally. In fact, they hold a lot of artifacts of Africaville, which is a town in the Nova Scotia East Atlantic Province just by the Atlantic Ocean there and there were very sad stories of how Their culture and even their town was wiped out forcibly You know, it would be interesting to look more at and the Ontario Black History Society Beatrice Wilkins is the person in the video if you look at the website and do the little teaser video You'll see her telling the story of how she was birthed by midwives and the history of birth birthing and midwives in Africaville Which is a key Location for some of our artifacts. Juanita Peters is the Africaville Museum manager the picture that you see depicted here is in Owen Sound and the the gray the gray Graystone community next slide, please Our funding comes from the American of Ontario midwives Association career researcher grant. So we've received and we're very grateful for a grant to launch our program before that in 2018-2019 we were basically self-funding but we were able to really do a tremendous amount once we got funding from them and also from our university Ryerson University to help with a lot of the student RA salaries and then finally from the social sciences and humanities research Council of Canada, which is similar to NIH in the United States But they look at the humanities and social sciences research as opposed to the CIHR, which looks at health research and because we're focusing on human rights and feminist view of of reproductive justice and the rights of workers and Immigration and settlement issues It was appropriate for us to get funding and it was great to have their insight development grant and we will continue to Go on to larger grants now that we've demonstrated a viability and sustainability of this pilot next slide, please our team includes Myself is the only midwife actually two midwives now because Chandra martini graduated last year and she is a you know an early career midwife She's also the descendant of a long line of black midwives in Alberta And we're so grateful she her mother is actually a historian and archivist and so it was so Powerful that she was sharing this information as a student project at University of Alberta When I got to know about her and then we were able to interview her and she is now on the team The remainder of the midwifery team are midwifery students of myself that are throughout our four-year bachelor of health science and midwifery program at Ryerson University and We're so grateful for them of Asian South Asian African and Caribbean heritage, so we have a very amazing team some of whom have had master's degrees in other areas prior to be being Prior to entering the midwifery program and some who are just for the first time delving into research and have no prior research experience It was a really great learning opportunity for them and gave them meaningful mess It was hard for them to understand the context of serving their communities without some of this history that until this time has been You know really hidden from their site. It's not in the textbooks. It's not in the literature. It's not in the media It really required digging deep Who is heading the history team is my dear colleague and co-PI is Dr. Karen Flynn from the University of Illinois Champlain and she is Supervising the RAs Who are on that team now so Maggie McDonald is our sociologist and historian who's been a great researcher for Canadian midwifery history in the past and You know, it was just a perfect fit She has been a long ally of our program. Meg Davies is also sociologist anthropologist and medical historian and her Her history of doing medical histories has been valuable. Dr. May Friedman is a fellow colleague from Ryerson University Maggie and Mega from York University's May is a colleague from Ryerson University's in the Social Work Department and has done a lot of video storytelling research and the power of the narrative and Has done tremendous work with gestational diabetes and storytelling in that population and the film and media production is He's going to be a doctor soon. He's working on his doctorate and should be defending actually very shortly is Cyrus Sunders saying a very well awarded Gemini award-winning filmmaker who had already made several films and had been doing work in the Africaville community in Nova Scotia and we are fortunate that he was able to make the film with the help of his team Ria Kapoor who is a communication and media student who is just graduating in June and has done a tremendous amount of work in our our branding and some of our our media and our website and Deon Andresco who is a web designer and Film renderer and so it has done a lot of great work with them our output and our deliverables next Next slide This was a really great slide. I wish it could have had animation, but it doesn't what you will see is that we're using a snowball Effect for sampling and recruitment. So one person tells another person all of these conferences that I'm presenting at I Welcome you to please email me at K. Wilson Mitchell at Ryerson dot CA and hopefully someone will type it in the chat for you because I'm finding stories about The history of midwifery coming from all kinds of unusual places Wherever I've presented whichever podcast I join whichever newspaper Writer or journalist, you know interviews me I get amazing leads and this is what our archivist and the team looks at and You know, certainly that the new members of our history team are going to be looking for those leads So one of the examples of why we have to dig down deep and why we sometimes have to read between the lines and look at The context of when the story was told because the storyteller doesn't always fill in all the pieces Like what were the forms of communication at the time in the 1850s 1890s? 1910 how did you let the midwife in the community know that someone needed to be attended to at the other end of town and How did you let somebody know that they needed a pickup truck or a horse and buggy? All those kinds of things what kinds of resources and tools did they use was it? You know a fire burning wood burning stove and you had a big kettle of hot water and that's how you sterilized your instruments What kind of traditional, you know Herbs or traditional methods were used in the care of the client Were they seen during the pregnancy or were they just seen at birth and then after the birth? What happened to the children of the midwife who looked after them when the midwife was away for two three four days? And there are many stories of the walking for miles Regardless of the terrain or the weather to get to birth your children not seeing you for quite a long time and even some trauma and Just the fatigue and the burnout that goes with the kind of work that we are still doing as midwives They faced some of those same things and the stories describe that but what we're finding is that these Communities existed they were fairly segregated and had to be self-reliant and creative So the very first photos that you'll see are this very well-known black Canadian settler in the West and You know We hear his story We hear that he was a great horseman that he was well respected by all of the white community members and was part of the community but we also hear that he and his wife had twin boys and Somehow she did not have access to the same kind of resources that maybe her white counterparts did and is that why one of the twin boys died in childbirth Nobody's telling us the story all we know is we find newspaper articles Photographs and it tells us that we need to ask the story Ask for the details of the story and dig deeper to look at what is missing in these photos They're not telling us the whole story, but there's something that happened now in most cultures You hear the story of the father You hear that maybe they were married to this particular partner But you don't hear the birth stories because often the birth story is hidden. It's not seen as important But of course to us as midwives the birth story is Important next slide, please This is another story of a very famous, you know, Mr. Reverend Dawson and many of the the members of this particular Community and then this newspaper article it says that many of these community members Had been fugitive slaves who came up with the Underground Railroad and were living in this community But once again, it doesn't tell you the whole story This child was born into that community. Who was the midwife? What were the circumstances of the birth? Why did he survive when somebody else's child did not survive? What kinds of resilience factors and variables were there and present? What kind of infrastructure was there in the community to provide respectful care? And we now know that respectful care is not just culturally appropriate being kind But it is also do you have access to high quality? Resources to be able to provide safe birth and to to survive the birth You know nutrition all the other kinds of Social determinants of health what kind of access was there for that community next slide, please Um once again, it's hidden. So I had to look through hundreds of birth certificates and birth registrations that came from births in Africaville a segregated community in the 1880s 90s 1910 1930 and how did I know that it was a black midwife who attended this black client This mother by looking at the birth certificate and looking at the identification So on my original slide there was a it seems we may have lost carline for a moment We'll hold on just a second as she tries to get back Can you hear me now? Yes, we can okay. I think whenever my phone goes out if you don't hear me, okay so This is a birth certificate example of how they described the race of the midwife or the birth attendant the name And the race of the mother and father so looking at each certificate hundreds of them and looking for this Whether it said black or it said african or it said colored and looking digging deep This is where archivist work is so crucial And also being able to look at all the other factors This is just one lead looking at the birth certificates Maybe looking at newspapers looking at cherished photographs that people have in their family heirlooms Looking at examples at the library or museum So there are a lot of different ways that the history the history team Uses to look for leads and and follows a lot follows up on these stories the next slide please Here's another example of you know Going to the museum and seeing what kinds of you know Heating and water supply and how did you heat your water? How did you sterilize your instruments? And could it be that they were using a stove like this in their home in the 1890s 10 at the time that these births were going on most likely yes So I didn't find this anywhere in midwifery literature or midwifery You know places where you would look for information I found this in a museum and so You know just tracking the results Were there horses in the community? Were there good horsemen? Were there people who could take somebody on horseback? I know there are stories of Mary Breckenridge and all of their counterparts in Kentucky I did my doctoral degree at frontier nursing university And it's amazing to see all the photographs of these midwives on horseback with the mother or the mother in the newborn On the horse with them fording across streams rivers going through you know Paths that only a very skilled horse could get through without breaking their leg Were we having similar stories in eastern canada in western canada? Because you know in the 1890s the horse was usually what most of them had And what kinds of of stories could you tell about getting to the birth? Or traveling from the birth to the hospital with someone who had a a complication after the birth So it's it's important to to get all these these pieces of information The stories that are revealed that we're finding over and over again is stories of resilience stories of hard work stories of Community ties and connections that were that were inspirational and shared knowledge and culture Next slide please So this is 200 years later And we're in 2021 and we're right back to where we started in our very first slide What does history have to do with what's going on right now? It has a lot to do with what's going on right now What we saw 200 years ago was an uneven distribution of tools assistance people resources There was restricted access and who cares about that? Well midwives care Who cares now that some of the members of our communities are uninsured or Are a race or a group of people that is discriminated against and that maybe the administrators of our facilities Don't want to even give them access We have gatekeepers in some of our facilities that won't even allow the clients to come in to be seen by midwives The midwives are often the ones who are advocating for these vulnerable groups to be able to receive care We're the ones who are daring to go into the communities or disobey Rules and policies to be able to give the community maybe an out-of-hospital birth So the same kinds of restrictions are here today the same kind of advocacy The same kind of resilience and creativity and mid or free work is seen today and it cannot stop Because we care we care because it matters because people matter Regardless of how they are socially positioned they matter to us And so helping to transmit and augment the voices of midwives is important. It's relevant We need to gather as many allies as we can to help us do this work. We cannot do it alone We cannot treat people equally either equally doesn't give them the opportunity to have the same kind of good outcomes in perinatal care and reproductive justice and access to resources We need to even the playing field by giving people what they need Not necessarily treating them equally or the same And so um, that's why this story is relevant next slide, please Carline, I'd like to break in for one moment and just let everyone know that there is a the keynote final presentation Or keynote presentation is beginning right now in room one But we will continue here until your presentation is over So anyone who wanted to catch the the keynote presentation can hop over to room one And then this the end of this will be available on the recording. Sorry about wonderful. Thank you so much, nisa Next slide, please. We're almost finished so um one of our Key health policy leaders, um dr. Jeannie shoveler who um is the chair of the the canadian institutes of health research And we have different particular chairs. She looks at population health She validates the fact that history is relevant We need to equip midwives or any health care provider to be able to work in immigrant communities And how do we prepare them to really have? Quality improvement that works that is evidence-based. We need to give them context We need to tell them the background of the population that they want to make a health intervention in and so that's why History makes a difference. It's part of the equity research that we do next slide, please So we're again looking at this map and trying to sample all these people. We're still doing our work next slide, please This is the link and I don't know if you're able to put it in the chat People are welcome to look at the video themselves and see one of the little teasers and to go to the website And look at the whole website and our artifacts. We're going to be launching a video a great reveal to uncover the history of the racialized midwives who immigrated to canada in the 19th and early 20th century Next next slide, please. I think this might be the end That that's the video next one. That's Beatrice giving her her story And next slide, please Okay, so if you have any stories if you wanted to look at this Link, you can actually, you know, put your information right into this form And I'm on twitter. I'm on you can look at our website, which is Ryerson dot ca slash midwifery If you have any stories or ideas or leads for us, I would welcome them and I appreciate you listening