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MAY 15, 2023
11
Tribal member advocates for cradleboard acceptance
By Danielle Harrison
Smoke Signals assistant editor/staff writer
Tribal member Valeria Atanacio
has long wanted to see cradleboards
become more accepted in child care
settings, but was onding the lack of
knowledge surrounding this tradi-
tional practice frustrating.
As the Tribal Affairs director for
the Oregon Early Learning Divi-
sion, she has encountered misun-
derstandings from pediatricians
and others when cradleboards were
brought up in meetings regarding
their use and relevance in child care
settings, particularly in facilities op-
erated by Tribes or those that serve
Indigenous communities.
So, she teamed up with Ai Binh
Ho, a fellow with the American
Council of Learned Societies who
focuses on innovations in child care
access at the Better Life Lab, to
co-author an article discussing the
beneots of cradleboard use in early
learning environments.
The two recently published their
article in Early Learning Nation,
an independent early learning
magazine.
<We started working on this to
bring awareness regarding cradle-
board use and acceptance,= Atanacio
says. <We9ve had top-level people
within state government and pe-
diatrics associations who have not
bought into the idea of supporting
cradleboard use. We decided we
needed to write this. There is a need
of more awareness and advocacy for
best practices and more policies that
support Tribes teaching this.=
In the past, Atanacio has served
as the Grand Ronde Tribe9s Teen
Pregnancy Prevention coordinator
and worked as an assistant pre-
school teacher for several years. Now
Photo by Michelle Alaimo
Tribal member Valeria Atanacio co-authored an article about the benefits
of using cradleboards in early learning and child care environments. She
is the Tribal Affairs director for the Oregon Department of Education Early
Learning Division.
33, she has years of education and
experience in child care settings,
as well as lived experience of using
cradleboards with her now 7- and
5-year-old daughters when they
were infants.
She and her sister, Isabella Atana-
cio, shared a cradleboard when their
eldest children were born approxi-
mately at the same time.
<The sensory sort of experience
of the child is different in a cradle
board than it would be for a baby
lying down in a bassinette and
this deonitely increases the child's
awareness and ability to kind of like
learn what their body feels like in
those moments of & just like being
held and comfortable in that way,=
she says. <I think that9s important
and one thing that it did for me as
a parent was it allowed me to take
some breaks because a lot of times
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as a new parent you tend to hold
your baby a lot and no one says put
down your baby because then they
will cry when you put them down.
So it really did allow for me to put
down my babies without that guilt.
They were content. So it worked out
and helped me.=
Atanacio spoke of this experience
in the article:
<The cradleboard 3 its construction,
movement among family members,
and history 3 is a unique product that
brings old and new family members
together, rebuilding ties severed by
boarding school. & The cradleboard
is much more than a sleeping appa-
ratus; it is a rite of passage for Indig-
enous parents in my community. It
is a journey home after generations
of being forced out of our homes and
away from our families.=
The article further explains that
cradleboard use in most child care
centers is only permitted through
an exemption process that requires
a pediatrician9s authorization.
<The exemption process signals to
parents that their care practices are
inferior, and demand the oversight
of a pediatrician that positions the
parents as ignorant, when, in real-
ity, the majority of physicians are
unfamiliar with cradleboards.=
The article points to several nation-
al and Tribal studies that conclude
cradleboards are one of the safest
sleep surfaces to prevent Sudden
Infant Death Syndrome, or SIDS.
<The First Nations Health Au-
thority, the National Institute for
Children9s Health Quality, and the
National Institute of Child Health
and Human Development have
all identified the cradleboard as
8one of the safest alternative sleep
surfaces9 that can prevent Sudden
Infant Death Syndrome (SIDs). The
National Institute of Health and
Human Development-led Healthy
Native Babies Project names cradle-
boards as a culturally appropriate
infant sleep surface.=
As a member of the state Safe
Sleep Coalition, Atanacio is advo-
cating for cradleboard use as a cul-
turally acceptable practice in SIDS
prevention, despite some pushback.
<We heard from some more vo-
cal personalities in the group that
there wasn9t any research on this so
they couldn9t endorse it,= she said.
<Coming from an advocacy lens and
knowing all the work that the nine
Tribes are doing to bring culture
back at the beginning of life, and
recognizing their sovereignty, this
was just always kind of like a dark
cloud or something over it because
as a state agency we oversee all of
the licensing for child care and ad-
ministration. Within our roles there
is this really specific way of how
infants and toddlers should sleep
in programs and that hasn9t always
been inclusive of different cultural
communities.=
Since the article was published in
late April, Atanacio said feedback
has been positive.
<This is a platform where we could
have an innuence in this sector of
work by sharing what we know,=
she says. <I9ve gotten e-mails from
our communities that we work with
here in Oregon including the direc-
tor from the Multnomah County
Preschool for All, who shared and
helped elevate the article.=
Atanacio says she plans to con-
tinue her advocacy regarding cra-
dleboards.
<What is really important is help-
ing the folks who are in the oeld,
to help them understand what a
cradleboard is and having a network
of resources to point them to,= she
says. þ