Pregnancy and Smoking

After reading about Aboriginal children being taken away from their families, I began to wonder what their lives would have been like if they had stayed. I wondered about a lot of aspects of what it would be like to grow up Aboriginal. While researching the Dreamtime, I came across the Aboriginal belief in a Spirit-Child. The belief is that a Spirit-Child will appear in a man’s dream and express desire for birth; At that time, the man tells the spirit where it can find his wife. One story describes a man who dreamed of his son six years before he was born. In the dream he saw a plane shot down by an enemy. The pilot of the plane emerged, with a wounded arm and leg, and told the man that he was his father, but he must go to America to get good medicine and would be born in six years. When his new baby boy was born with a crooked arm and leg, the man immediately recognized him from his dream. It is also believed that a Spirit-Child can find his father if he is in a semi-dream state, such as when he is hunting, and he will ride home on his chosen father’s shoulder. Spiritual belief even triumphs science in Aboriginal Society, where in some groups, a man will not accept paternity unless he had dreamed of his Spirit-Child. In other cases, men will accept a child that is not biologically theirs, as was the case with one Aboriginal man who accepted the child his wife bore during their five year separation. The opposite situation has also occurred; some men haven’t accepted their biological children because they did not meet the Spirit-Child in a dream, in which case the woman must find the man who dreamed of the child she bore.

Another interesting piece of Aboriginal culture involving children that I found was a practice called ‘smoking the baby’. This ceremony is performed by the group’s ‘healer’ and is considered the start of a child’s ‘real life’. It’s a pretty simple ceremony to perform; a pit is dug and a fire is started, the fire is then partially put out with water and the smoky embers are covered with konkerberry leaves. The baby is rubbed down with water to prevent burns and is then held in the smoke for about twenty seconds. The smoking serves as a cleansing or purification for the baby, but smoking itself is not reserved solely for babies, it is considered a great honor to be smoked, it serves as a medical ‘cure-all’.

These two Aboriginal beliefs are extremely different from what one would encounter in Western Society. Here in America we are all about finding the biological father of a child, the process can even be found on popular television shows; (Maury Povich any one?) Although when televised its usually for the drama involved if the boyfriend/husband is not the father. You would also be hard pressed to find a new mom that would allow you to immerse her baby in a smoke pit in Western Society as most would consider inhaling smoke to be an unhealthy thing for a baby to be doing. Although I find the belief in a Spirit-Child interesting and see the spiritual ties within the Aboriginal beliefs, I personally would not want to give birth only to have my husband tell me that I did not have the child of his dreams and would therefore have to find the man who did dream up my child. I suppose this wouldn’t be as big of a deal in Aboriginal society because of their different form of mapping kinship; after all, most of the children have more than one ‘mother’ and ‘father’. And, children are raised by their community as a whole, so they would probably not feel rejected. Another thing I thought about is that if the Spirit-Child really chose his father, then he or she came into this world already knowing who his or her parents were and would therefore probably expect for their birth-mother to find the man they chose.

Works Cited:


Elizabeth Carman and Neil Carman
Spirit-Child: The Aboriginal Experience of Pre-Birth Communication. Electronic document
http://www.birthpsychology.com/lifebefore/concept10.html, accessed Nov. 11

Arden, Harvey
1994 Dreamkeepers. New York: HarperCollins Publishers Inc.

Image Source: http://www.footprints.org.au/uploadimages/Indig_kids_large.jpg