Deanna Kingston doing work on King Island as part of an NSF grant. (contributed photo)

A number of Deanna Kingston’s long-time friends, students and colleagues have been sharing their memories of Kingston this week. Here are a few samples:

From Allison Davis-White Eyes, coordinator of the Indian Education Office at OSU:

“In remembering Deanna (Dee), I can recall her care for students and her drive to help Native students excel, not simply pass their classes, because they are Native students. She and I shared many conversations about the need for Native students, in fact all students, to have grounding in both western epistemologies as well as indigenous. We both encouraged each other in small ways that helped propel the trajectories of our work, I with my graduate students (which was inspired by Deanna) and she with the publication of her book with the OSU Press.

If there is one thing that can be said for Deanna is that she is courageous, to the point where it was awe-inspiring. I can recall her telling us about what she was going through physically in great detail, as though she, the researcher, were doing a case study on her own condition.

In between her bouts of ill health Deanna exemplified all life had to offer. She was buoyant, always hopeful, engaged with her work, students and colleagues. She was active, and enjoyed the sun and softball on a sunny Oregon day. She travelled extensively and with curiosity and purpose. She had a drive to live life to its fullest potential and to share their drive with others. She did not have patience for silliness, pettiness or egotistical rivalries.

Deanna was, in a sense, a person who sought out life in its purest and fullest form and was never afraid, frightened or deterred from experiencing it. Needless to say, this is more than I can say for most of us.

Deanna also worked with closely with many of us on the OSU Native American Graves and Repatriation project (Horner Museum), assuring that tribes received their sacred and funerary objects that had been held by the University for years. She advocated strongly on behalf of Tribes, raised important questions, and defended Tribal sovereignty in the discussions. If there is one thing Deanna did for all of us here at OSU, she made the word “indigenous” a proud word.

Perhaps the other item that stands out about Deanna is her undying devotion to her son Eddie. Every minute that Dee could muster between her academic life and personal life went to Eddie. In fact, there were times where she simply blocked out the day or half the day and stated, that is my time with Eddie. Eddie is Deanna’s only child, and as such, was not only the grounding and driving force in Deanna’s life, but he is also the love of her life. This young man will have many beautiful memories, and perhaps just as important, the beautiful memories of all of us who remember Deanna to share with him.”

From Renee Roman Nose, former student:

“This is what I would say as someone who worked with her, studied under her, learned from her, was advised by her, served as a GTA for her, was fascinated by her stories and happy to share my own, and was greatly impacted by her while I studied for my degree at OSU.

Deanna touched lives, that’s what she was best at. Once she impacted your life, you knew it, you knew she was someone special and that she was passionate about her family, her research, and her students. We called her Dee, we called her friend, we called her sister. She was more than a professor, more than a mentor, she was family. I celebrate her life, I celebrate the impact she had on my own life, I celebrate what knowledge she gained over her short life and how she lived, really lived, each and every day. I celebrate her courage, her strength, applaud her family for raising such an exceptional person and sharing her with the world.

I will remember her laughter, her kind words, the way she would give a quick nod when you answered her correctly, how she loved hearing jokes. I will remember her well. That’s all I can say without tears.”

Melissa Cheyney holds two-week-old Ninkasi Cedar Cheyney Meskil, her first child. A midwife and a professor, she now has experienced her own homebirth, which gives her a greater perspective. (photo: Theresa Hogue)

Birth has been Melissa Cheyney’s work and life focus for a number of years. As a practicing midwife and assistant professor of medical anthropology and reproductive biology at Oregon State University, Cheyney researches homebirth and the joys and controversies surrounding midwifery.

But Cheyney has now added another layer of understanding to her study of homebirth. On May 5, she gave birth at home to her first child, Ninkasi Cedar, attended by a midwife.

For Cheyney, her entire pregnancy was an eye-opener, as all the advice she’d provided to mothers was put to the test. One of the biggest tests was her 20-hour labor, due in part to the fact that Ninkasi was in posterior position, that is, her head was against her mother’s spine, a very difficult way to deliver.

The birth was so “athletic” and involved so much pushing, positioning and pain, that Cheyney had to consider if she needed to be taken to the hospital. Despite her dedication to homebirth, she also recognizes that sometimes, for the health of the baby and mother, a hospital transport is necessary.

“It’s a little like a game of cards,” she said. “Some of it is luck and some of it is strategy. But I told myself ‘Don’t stay home to prove a point.’”

In the end, Cheyney was able to deliver without complications, and she said the experience really affirmed her believe in midwife care.

At the same time that little Ninkasi was coming into the world, news of Cheyney’s most recent work was starting to attract media attention. Cheyney and doctoral student Courtney Everson have uncovered a pattern of distrust – and sometimes outright antagonism – among physicians at hospitals and midwives who are transporting their homebirth clients to the hospital because of complications.
Cheyney said the work revealed an ongoing conflict between physicians and midwives, similar to that found in other studies of the dynamics between the two groups across the country.

The pair recently examined birth records in Oregon’s Jackson County from 1998 through 2003, a period when that county saw higher-than-expected rates of prematurity and low birth weight in some populations. The researchers wanted to assess whether those rates were linked to midwife-attended homebirths.

The findings revealed that assisted homebirths did not appear to be contributing to the lower-than-average health outcomes and, in fact, that the homebirths documented all had successful outcomes. But even more importantly to Cheyney, discussions with doctors and midwives uncovered a deep mistrust between the two groups of birthing providers, with doctors expressing the firm belief that only hospital births are safe, while midwives felt marginalized, mocked and put on the defensive when in contact with physicians.

“We’ve been getting insight into their world view, and it’s been quite illuminating,” Cheyney said.

Ninkasi Cedar Cheyney Meskil

Cheyney said she was surprised that physicians, when presented with scientifically conducted research that indicates homebirths do not increase infant mortality rates, still refuse to believe that births outside of the hospital are safe.

“Medicine is a social construct, and it’s heavily politicized,” she said.

She is working with Lane County obstetrician Dr. Paul Qualtere-Burcher to draft guidelines that would help midwives and their clients decide when they need to seek medical help, based in large part on Cheyney’s research.

They’re also looking at guidlines that would ask physicians to recognize midwives as legitimate caregivers.

Qualtere-Burcher said he believes that if midwives felt more comfortable contacting physicians with medical questions or concerns, there would be a greater chance that women would get medical help when they needed it.

“Treat (midwives) with respect, as colleagues, and they’ll not be afraid to call,” he said.

Last year the American Medical Association passed Resolution 205, which states: “The safest setting for labor, delivery and the immediate post-partum period is in the hospital, or a birthing center within a hospital complex…” The resolution was passed in direct response to media attention on home births, the AMA stated.

What is interesting, Cheyney points out, is that 99 percent of American births occur in the hospital, but the United States has one of the highest infant mortality rates of any developed country, with 6.3 deaths per 1,000 babies born. Meanwhile, the Netherlands, where a third of deliveries occur in the home with the assistance of midwives, has a lower rate of 4.73 deaths per 1,000.

One of the biggest problems Cheyney sees is that physicians only come into contact with midwives when something has gone wrong with the homebirth, and the patient has been transported to the hospital for care. There are a number of reasons why this interaction often is tension-filled and unpleasant for both sides, she says.

First is the assumption that homebirth must be dangerous, because the patient they’re seeing has had to be transported to the hospital. Secondly, the physician is now taking on the risk of caring for a patient who is unknown to them, and who has a medical chart provided by a midwife which may not include the kind of information the physician is used to receiving.

And because the midwife is often feeling defensive and upset, Cheyney said, the contact between her and the physician can often be tense and unproductive. Meanwhile, the patient, whose intention was not to have a hospital birth, is already feeling upset at the change in birth plan, and is now watching her care provider come into conflict with the stranger who is about to deliver her baby.

“It’s an extremely tension-fraught encounter,” Cheyney said, “and something needs to be done to address it.” As homebirths increase in popularity, she added, these encounters are bound to increase and a plan needs to be in place so that doctors and midwives know what protocol to follow.

“We’re having a meeting in early May to propose a draft for a model of collaborative care that might be the first of its kind,” in the United States, Cheyney said.

The research was funded by OSU’s Department of Anthropology Summer Writing Fellowship, the Center for the Study of Women and Society, and the Stanton Women’s Health Fellowship.

~ Theresa Hogue

This image of Deanna Kingston's maternal grandfather appeared on the cover of Terra magazine.

The next month, we went to Fairbanks to attend the Alaska Anthropology Association annual meeting.  There, we met with other King Island Inupiat Eskimo elders and showed them the photograph. They confirmed that it was indeed her father, taken 16 years before my mother was born.  By pure chance, the editors of Terra magazine decided to use a photograph of someone who was my relative!

This was not the first time I have seen a photograph of my grandfather in print.  In 1992, when I was an intern at the Arctic Studies Center at the Smithsonian Institution, I went to the Natural History Museum’s gift shop.  I browsed through the books in the Arctic section and saw one on kayaks and canoes.  I pulled it off the shelf and read the back cover.  “Cool,” I thought, “there’s an article on King Island kayaks.”  So, I opened it to a random page and saw a photograph on the left-hand side.  There, an elderly Eskimo man was holding up a paddle.  I read the caption, “Stanislaus Muktoyuk demonstrates the finishing position for rolling.”  It was my grandfather.

A year later, I came back to the Arctic Studies Center and the Human Studies Film Archives at the Smithsonian to do research on the Bernard Hubbard, S.J., film.  Father Hubbard, the “Glacier Priest”, spent a year on King Island from 1937-38, and shot about 20 hours of film there in addition to taking between 2,000 and 4,000 photographs.  My Uncle Alex came out for a week to view the film.  I was thrilled to hear him say things like, “Oh, there’s my mom, Agiavinaq.  There’s my father.  There’s my older brother, Edward.  There’s your namesake, Paniataaq”, etc.  Then, my advisor, Stephen Loring, took us to museum storage to look at items from King Island.  As Stephen opened one drawer, my uncle pointed to a cribbage board made of walrus ivory and asked, “Is that from King Island?”  Stephen pulled the tag out from under the cribbage board and said, “Yes, it is.  How did you know?”  Uncle Alex said, “Well, I recognized the way the carver drew the seal on the ice floe.  As far as I know, my dad was the only person to make them that way!”

These have not been isolated incidents.  There’s the time my friend Karen told me about a King Island story she found in Knud Rasmussen’s report of the Fifth Thule Expedition.  The story was about the King Island Messenger Feast/Wolf Dance, which became the subject of my dissertation.  Rasmussen recorded the story from “Arnasungak from King Island.”  Today, we spell this name “Agnazungaq” and after consulting with elders, we decided that the story was told to Rasmussen by my great-grandfather, my mother’s mother’s father.  I subsequently heard the story from Lucy Koyuk, my mother’s first cousin, who was also grand-daughter to Agnazungaq.

I feel very fortunate – I have always enjoyed learning about other people and cultures, but it seems that sometimes, my research falls literally right into my lap.  I’ve seen King Island masks at the New Bedford Whaling Museum and at the Field Museum in Chicago.  There’s a King Island kayak at the National Museum of the American Indian.  I know the sisters of Charles Kukuluk, whose ivory carving of an owl or some other bird is on display at the British Museum in London.  Rie Munoz, the famous Alaskan painter and artist, was a school teacher on King Island from 1951-52.  Her ex-husband, Juan, wrote an article in National Geographic that featured King Island (“The Cliff Dwellers of Bering Strait”) in January 1954.  My mom and uncles Gabriel and Alex were in the photographs of that article.  I’ve met Phil and Ellen Viereck, other schoolteachers on King Island from 1949-51, who wrote and illustrated a children’s book entitled “Eskimo Island”.  Ellen once gave me and my uncle original drawings from the school children there.  Of the set of about 100 drawings and stories, there were 13 created by my mom.  How many people literally find documents and images created by their family members as they conduct research?

This is why I love my job.  I get paid for stuff like this!

OSU Assistant Professor of Anthropology Melissa Cheyney examines a client. (photo by Karl Maasdam)

Oregon Gov. Ted Kulongoski recently appointed Oregon State University Assistant Professor of Anthropology Melissa Cheyney to the State Board of Direct Entry Midwifery.

The Board oversees peer review, education, examinations, enforcement, public safety, legislation and rules for the practice of midwifery in the State of Oregon. It consists of seven members – six midwives and one obstetrician. Terms of office are three years.

Cheyney’s appointment was confirmed by the Oregon Senate on June 26, and she took the Oath of Office on July 14.

Cheyney, an applied medical anthropologist, is also a practicing midwife.

“I value the opportunity to translate my ongoing research on the culture and safety of midwife-attended delivery into effective policy change,” she said.

According to The Oregonian, Cheyney says it’s safe for healthy mothers with low-risk pregnancies to labor at home or in a birth center under the care of an experienced midwife.

That theory puts her at odds with the mainstream U.S. medical practice of delivering babies in hospitals. To prove it, she must collect data about every Oregon baby intentionally born outside a hospital.

“Among the most wealthy countries, the United States now ranks 31st in infant mortality. The vast majority of our nation’s births are in hospitals, and about one-third of those are by Caesarean section. The World Health Organization recommends no more than 10 to 15 percent, so our rate is two to three times higher than what is considered safe. And yet, society maintains the myth that births at home are risky,” says Cheyney in the summer issue of Terra.

Cheyney and her research assistant, Courtney Everson, must track down midwives with deeply rooted beliefs that birth shouldn’t be a medical event and persuade them to report information as a doctor would, all while reassuring them that the study won’t jeopardize their freedom to care for mothers and babies.

Recruiting midwives has been easier than Cheyney expected. The Oregon Midwifery Council, a professional organization with licensed and unlicensed members, voted to support Cheyney’s work in September. As of February, Forty-one midwives had agreed to submit data to the Midwives Alliance of North America’s statistics project, which will separate Oregon’s numbers, The Oregonian says.