Due to a confluence of factors, Room Magazine is posting this Indigenous History Month feature later than planned. However, Room holds that Indigenous histories, presents, and futures are to be honored year-round, and post this feature now to assert that.
What is a country? What do we understand of the story we tell ourselves, the stories we are told?
For our 2025 Indigenous History Month feature, we’re revisiting Marilyn Dumont’s “A Nation of Indigenous Midwives Delivered This Country,” first published in Room 43.2 Devour.
A Nation of Indigenous Midwives Delivered This Country
by Marilyn Dumont
brown bent women
singing water circles
rain-suckling
minnow-threading
babies licked to sleep swinging
drifting their threads
through wiwip’son
babies wrapped in heavy flannel
through ropes strung
corner to corner
of the room
within easy reach of a brown hand
lulling awasis to sleep again
dark women circles
brooding litters
women with strong minds
and swings across their beds
suckled minnows to sleep
through water veins
water webbed
suckled minnows threading
through swoop fluid diving
brown hands massaging the belly of the motherland
steeping wild raspberry tea
for the coming labour
Check out our Indigenous History Month Statement and Reading List, or revisit Room 43.2 Devour
