Urgent investment needed to reclaim lactation care and training to support Indigenous women, babies, families, and communities.

Indigenous women have been nurturing and sustaining our babies through breastfeeding for thousands of years as an important practice for health, wellbeing, community and culture. Breastfeeding is key to giving our babies the best start to life. For many Indigenous women in Western colonized countries breastfeeding and cultural practices have been disrupted by the ongoing impacts of colonization. In this article, we draw on our lived experiences as Indigenous women with breastfeeding knowledges and a review on the field of breastfeeding support. We highlight how cultural breastfeeding practices and cultural medicines, including community-governed use of plant medicines, ceremony, massage and other practices defined by each Community, sustain breastfeeding, maternal wellbeing and infant health, yet remain marginalized in mainstream lactation care. There is a need to reclaim the lactation support space to have care that is grounded in our ways of knowing, being and doing. Indigenous voices have been sidelined from the breastfeeding support and lactation training space due to Western centric knowledges and a colonial lens being privileged. Therefore, prioritizing and privileging the voices and knowledges of Indigenous women and amplifying their experiences into the lactation field will improve breastfeeding rates and health outcomes. We call for the urgent investment into lactation care that prioritizes Indigenous knowledge systems, including cultural medicines, to support Indigenous women through their breastfeeding journeys. This requires funding, resources, investment, and support to build an Indigenous lactation workforce and recognize Indigenous-led lactation training as legitimate and necessary ways of supporting Indigenous women and families to breastfeed.