Indigenous cradles: The powerful invention that changed lives

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Throughout history, humans have produced creative solutions to make parenting easier. Today, that might look like smart socks that measure your baby’s vital signs while sleeping or electronic swings that soothe them while you’re trying to get housework done. But the concept of “baby gear” or “parenting technology” has been around for thousands of years—and we see evidence of it across the world.

Indigenous women: Scientists, teachers and inventors 

NHMU’s curator of ethnography, Alexandra Greenwald, studies women’s societal roles, particularly regarding child rearing practices, foraging, preparing, and providing food for their families and communities. This is a vital role that often gets overlooked.

“Everyone is so focused on men, meat and stone tools because bones and stone tools preserve so well in the archaeological record,” said Greenwald, who is also an assistant professor in the U’s Department of Anthropology. “But that doesn’t mean that was the only thing that was happening. Women, and men too, in certain contexts, were experimenting with food safety as they were foraging and cooking plants.”

While the information on what plants were safe to eat, in what quantities, and by which method of preparation was eventually passed down as ancestral knowledge, there was a time when nobody had that information. These women conducted some of the first experiments, learning by trial and error how to keep their families safe and healthy.

“Humans, especially women, have been scientists and mathematicians, experimenting for time immemorial, figuring out their landscape, what is safe, what is not safe,” Greenwald said.

Second, Indigenous communities relied heavily on the resources foraged and prepared by women. For many tribes across the western United States, plant foods formed the core of the diet. The women in these tribes were making trade-offs between their roles as household or community breadwinners and their obligations as mothers. This constant balancing act interested Greenwald, so she began looking at how they were managing to fulfill both roles so seamlessly—and investigating the technology they’d created to make the work more manageable.

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