The Fireweed Project
Indigenous Peoples and the Right to Abortion
The Fireweed Project is a research project based out of University of Victoria and co-led with four community organizations across Canada, including: Abortion Support Services Atlantic, ekw’í7tl Indigenous doula collective, Northern Reproductive Justice Network, and Northern Manitoba Abortion Support.
This project aims to learn from Indigenous women, Two-Spirit, and LGBTQIA+ community members who have accessed or tried to access an abortion, as well as service providers working in abortion care, with the hopes of improving the culturally safe service gap in Canada.
This project is funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada’s Race, Gender and Diversity Initiative grant.
The name of this project was inspired by a conversation with one of the participant’s from our pilot project. This person shared their community’s traditional use of fireweed to induce abortion:
“There’s one plant called fireweed and you can usually find it up in northern Alberta or anywhere where there’s been forest fires because it’s a plant that grows and grows after forest fires. But I know that we traditionally used that as birth control, but also as a medicine to implement abortion… I kind of have a philosophy that … with the knowledge of herbal methods ending a pregnancy, Indigenous culture suggests a tradition of honoring pregnant people’s self-determination of their own bodies. … Unfortunately, in my culture you hear a lot of “abortions never happened, we didn’t do abortions, abortions are a sin” and … I think that really came from colonial Christian Catholic, settler ideologies.”
Why Fireweed?
