Katsi Cook

Biography

Katsi Cook is an Elder midwife and ambassador to the landscape of Indigenous women leadership circles. She is an advocate of Indigenous women’s health across the life cycle, drawing from a longhouse traditionalist perspective the idea of Woman as the First Environment.

Katsi’s previous work in the First Environment Collaborative focused on the intersections of environmental health, reproductive health, justice research and policy. Her ground-breaking environmental research on Mohawk mothers’ milk revealed the harmful generational impact of toxic pollutants within the St. Lawrence River.

Currently, Katsi serves as Director of the Akwesasne Health Care Foundation in Albany, New York. She holds the values, vision and purpose of the Spirit Aligned Leadership Program, imparting her knowledge of Indigenous communities and decades of culture-based program design, direction and implementation. Katsi is also partnered with the Elders Council of the Indigenous Justice Division of Ontario, in response to the 94 Calls to Action of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada.

As a professional member of the Interim Regulatory Council of the College of Midwives of Ontario in 1991, Katsi worked with colleagues to implement the exemption for Aboriginal Midwives and Healers in the 1991 Midwifery Act and the Regulated Health Professions Act in Ontario. In 1992, Katsi became the founding Aboriginal midwife of the Six Nations Birthing Centre, the first and only freestanding birth centre in Canada at that time. Its practices are grounded in the concept of the Haudenosaunee Creation story.

Katsi is a member of the Wolf Clan from the Mohawk Community of Akwesasne.