2020/09/05 by Sarah Knott
Social Sciences · #Canadian Identity and History
paper · doi:10.1093/pastj/gtaa032
In early twentieth-century Hobbema, now Maskwacis, in western Canada, Cree women had long-standing habits of multigenerational extended mothering. Breastfeeding was usual, a birth mother’s own task. Other forms of childcare might be carried out by female relatives, especially grandmothers. They gathered moss for the cradleboard, or laundered newer-fangled cloth nappies. They cross-fed, nursing another’s child, when there were twins. A grandmother or an aunt might sleep with the baby during weaning, ready with warm soup or a broth of scrapings from buffalo hide. This Cree historical scene highlights mother as a verb: a form of labour, a set of activities based in a relationship, entailing many ways of interacting and doing. Seeing mothering in this light, the Cree scene also reveals that maternal labour dispersed beyond birth or adoptive mothers. Indeed, several centuries earlier, among the Miami peoples in a similarly harsh northern climate, ‘mother’ and ‘maternal aunt’ were precisely the same word, a telling fusion of terminology.1