Photo: Aditya Romansa | Unsplash
In labor with her first child, Lucia Hernández Rumian danced around her hospital room while her husband played a ritual drum, and got massages and oil rubdowns insteada of pain medication. Her cultural liaison ceremonially purified the space according to Mapuche customs. The largest public hospital in the Chilean city of Osorno is finding new ways to incorporate Indigenous health care practices. There’s a special delivery room, forms for doctors to approve herbal treatments from trusted traditional healers, and protocols for “good dying”. Cristina Muñoz, the certified nurse-midwife who launched the delivery protocols, was inspired by Cristina Aron, who had hoped to deliver her daughter with a traditional midwife a decade ago but because of Chilean law, needed a professional health worker to deliver her baby. Chilean law now requires hospitals to give the placenta to mothers if asked and mandates intercultural care in places with a significant Indigenous population.
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