Sherrill Elizabeth Tekatsitsiakawa “Katsi” (pronounced Gudji) Cook is a Mohawk Native American midwife, environmentalist, Native American rights activist, and women's health advocate. She is best known for her environmental justice and reproductive health research in her home community, the Mohawk Nation at Akwesasne in upstate New York.
She is the director of Running Strong for American Indian Youth and founder of the organization's Woman is the First Environment Collaborative which supports community-based health projects seeks that seek to empower Native women of all ages and increase knowledge concerning reproductive health. She has founded a number of organizations serving the Akwesasne community, including the Women's Dance Health Program, the Mother's Milk Monitoring Project, and the Konon:kwe Council.
Cook has stated that "Women are the first environment. We are an embodiment of our Mother Earth. From the bodies of women flows the relationship of the generations both to society and the natural world. With our bodies we nourish, sustain and create connected relationships and interdependence. In this way the Earth is our mother, our ancestors said. In this way, we as women are earth.”
Early life and education
The youngest of four children, Katsi Cook was born on 4 January 1952, to Kawennaien Evelyn Mountour Cook and William John Cook on the St. Regis Mohawk Reservation, or the Mohawk Nation of Akwesasne. Her father, a graduate of Dartmouth College, was a pilot who fought in World War II and the Korean War. He died in a plane accident when Cook was nine months old. Her mother was raised in Quebec and educated by Catholic nuns, but died when Cook was 11 years old. During the remainder of her childhood, Katsi Cook lived with her paternal grandmother, Kanatires Elizabeth Herne Cook, a midwife who had delivered Cook as well as many other children at Akwesasne.
Katsi Cook was educated at Catholic boarding school, though she began practicing the traditional Longhouse Religion as a teenager. She attended Skidmore College from 1970 to 1972, and then transferred to Dartmouth College as a part of the school's first class of women. Shortly thereafter, she left school in order to participate in the American Indian Movement (AIM).
Cook later returned to complete her undergraduate degree in Biology and Society in the School of Human Ecology at Cornell University in the mid-1980s.
Education and career
Between 1972 and 1977, and then again from 1979 to 1983, Cook and Barreiro worked with the Kanienkehaka Longhouse Council of Chiefs on Akwesasne Notes, a newspaper that published articles from around the country relevant to or written about the Akwesasne community.
Cook decided to pursue midwifery in 1977 after attending the Loon Lake Conference of the Six Nations. Speakers at the conference emphasized the important role traditional birthing practices play in enabling Native women to reclaim sovereignty over their bodies; control over reproduction was also seen as a method to reclaim Native sovereignty in and of itself. She completed a spiritual midwifery apprenticeship at The Farm in Tennessee in 1978, followed by clinical training at the University of New Mexico Women's Health Training Program.
Cook also attended the founding meeting of Women of all Red Nations (WARN) in 1978 and later did a clinical placement at the Red Schoolhouse Clinic, a WARN project in St Paul, Minnesota. There she founded the Women's Dance Health Project as a community-based initiative. Cook moved back to Akwesasne in 1980 after finding a group of women to continue the project.
At Akwesasne, Cook continued to practice midwifery which included providing prenatal care, delivery, post-partum care, family planning, family counseling, and other services. She also helped found the Akwesasne Freedom School – an independent school which teaches K-8th grades – in 1979. Around the same time, Cook established the Women's Dance Health Program at Akwesasne.