We Honor
Before lactation became a profession, it was knowledge carried through families, villages, and generations.
Before there were clinics, certifications, pumps, or feeding plans, there were people tending to one another, sharing wisdom, preparing remedies, nourishing babies, caring for recovering parents, and holding families through birth, loss, illness, and transition.
At The Obsidian Milk Collective, we understand that advancing Lactation Justice requires more than imagining a better future.
It requires remembering.
We Honor the Land
The Obsidian Milk Collective serves families across lands now called Alabama, lands that have been home to Indigenous peoples for thousands of years.
We recognize the Muscogee, Cherokee, Choctaw, Chickasaw, and other Indigenous peoples whose communities have lived upon, cultivated, protected, and maintained relationships with these lands across generations.
We acknowledge the violence of land theft, forced removal, displacement, and the disruption of Indigenous family, healing, birthing, and infant-feeding traditions.
A land acknowledgment cannot restore what was taken. It should call us into responsibility.
We honor the original caretakers of this land and the Indigenous people and Tribal communities who remain here today.
We Honor Those Whose Milk Became Forced Labor
We honor the enslaved African and African American women whose bodies, fertility, caregiving, and milk were treated as property.
Many were forced to nurse and care for the children of enslavers while being separated from their own babies or denied the freedom to feed and nurture their children as they chose. Their milk sustained households and economies that refused to recognize their humanity.
We will not romanticize this history.
It was not simply “wet nursing.”
It was coercion.
It was extraction.
It was forced labor.
We remember the mothers who grieved children they could not protect, hold, or feed freely.
We remember the children whose nourishment was interrupted by slavery.
We remember the families whose bonds were deliberately broken, and the people who continued loving, feeding, resisting, and surviving within conditions designed to destroy them.
We Honor the Village
Black infant feeding has never belonged only to one parent and one baby.
Across generations, families have been held by grandmothers, aunties, sisters, neighbors, midwives, healers, friends, and community members. Knowledge was shared through observation, storytelling, touch, food, plants, prayer, and presence.
When one person was recovering, another brought food.
When a baby needed care, someone made room.
When knowledge was threatened, someone carried it forward.
The village did not replace the parent.
The village surrounded them.
We honor every person who helped another family survive, even when their name was never recorded.
We Honor the Healers and Knowledge Keepers
We honor the Black midwives, herbalists, root workers, birth workers, healers, and community caretakers who used the knowledge available to them to tend to their people.
They understood that nourishment was connected to the whole person: the body, the mind, the spirit, the family, the land, and the community.
They prepared foods and plant remedies. They supported pregnancy, birth, postpartum recovery, infant feeding, illness, grief, and death. They carried traditions with roots throughout Africa while adapting that knowledge under slavery, segregation, medical exclusion, and limited access to formal care. Historical records and cultural preservation work document traditions of Black herbal healing, “granny midwives,” home remedies, and community-based care throughout the South.
We honor their wisdom without treating every inherited practice as universally safe or appropriate today.
To honor ancestral knowledge is not to abandon evidence.
It is to recognize that evidence, observation, lived experience, and community wisdom have always existed, even when institutions refused to name Black people as experts.
We Honor Black Families
We honor every Black family that found a way to nourish a child under systems that made feeding harder than it should have been.
We honor those who breastfed and chestfed.
Those who expressed milk by hand.
Those who shared milk or participated in community feeding.
Those who used bottles, donor milk, or formula.
Those who combination fed.
Those who relactated.
Those who stopped.
Those whose feeding journeys were changed by illness, loss, separation, employment, incarceration, migration, adoption, foster care, medical racism, inadequate support, or lack of access.
We honor families whose experiences were joyful.
We honor families whose experiences were complicated.
We honor families who are still grieving the experience they deserved but did not receive.
No family owes us a perfect feeding story to be worthy of dignity.
We Honor the Right to Choose Freely
Our ancestors were denied autonomy over their bodies, their children, their labor, and their milk.
Today, honoring them requires protecting the choices of Black families, not controlling them in a different way.
Lactation Justice is not achieved by pressuring every person to breastfeed.
It is achieved when every family has:
truthful and culturally relevant information;
access to skilled clinical lactation care;
protection from coercion and discrimination;
adequate food, rest, housing, income, and parental leave;
safe human milk, formula, and feeding supplies;
community support without shame;
and the freedom to make informed decisions about their own bodies and babies.
We Carry Them Forward
We do not remember our ancestors only for what was done to them.
We remember what they created.
They created family in the face of separation.
They preserved knowledge in the face of erasure.
They nourished children in the face of scarcity.
They built villages in the face of displacement.
They practiced care in places that offered them none.
Their survival was not consent to their suffering.
Their strength does not excuse what they endured.
But because they carried life forward, we are here.
The Obsidian Milk Collective honors that inheritance by working toward a future where Black families are no longer expected to survive without the care, resources, protection, and community they deserve.
We remember.
We reclaim.
We restore.
We honor.