Tekatsi:tsia’kwa “Katsi” Cook

Katsi Cook’s work spans many worlds and disciplines, and demonstrates a lifelong career of advancing the superlatives of Indigenous Knowledge.

Katsi draws from a Haudenosaunee traditionalist perspective the idea of Woman as the First Environment. Her groundbreaking environmental research of Mohawk mothers’ milk revealed the harmful generational impact of toxic pollutants within the St. Lawrence River. She established Canada’s National Aboriginal Council of Midwives and currently serves as Executive Director of the Spirit Aligned Leadership Program.

Of her practice as an aboriginal midwife, Katsi explains, “it’s not just the baby coming into the world, but the ability to raise that baby in a world where it too can reproduce, and reproduce the culture, language, ceremonies, what it means to be Onkwehonwe (Haudenosaunee). It became a practice of recovering culture, of recovering families that are the basis of the culture and the women who are the stalk of the corn that hold it up.”