Changing Woman Initiative was dreamed up by founder Nicolle L. Gonzales, a Navajo Nurse-Midwife. After years of working as a midwife in her community and seeing many Native American women struggle with navigating Western medical healthcare systems, she felt there was a better way that would center the needs of the women and families she cared for. Nicolle saw assimilation being practiced from birth on which has a huge impact on a Native American family’s ability to bring their loved ones into this world. She wanted to reinstate a culturally supported and include ceremonial ways into births that are representative of the community they come from.
Our Mission
We are indigenous leaders and community healers, centering our families and communities, transforming the cultural narrative and setting in motion policy changes. Our mission is to support our diverse indigenous communities, to renew cultural birth, and the fundamental indigenous human right to reproductive health, dignity and justice.
Our Vision
Our vision is to restore the sovereignty of indigenous midwifery and community health with the return to gender equality and cultural birth practices.
Core Values
To honor all our relations through language, land, ceremony, and traditions; with humility, responsibility, fortitude, compassion, generosity, and respect.
Story of CWI
Asdzáá Naadleehi (Changing Woman)
The Navajo people have been and always will be a matrilineal society. We represent our mother’s first clans. The very first Navajo leader was Asdzáá Naadleehi, Changing Woman, who created us. She led our people into a life full of prosperity with songs and prayers. It is our mothers who pray more for her kids than herself. She cooks the meal, but has the last bite.
Even in our traditional ceremonies, our songs are based on female deities. Shimá Nahasdzáán, Dził Asdzáá, Tó Asdzáá, Ch’il Naad’ąąh Asdzáá, and much more. The women hold and carry the family tradition and values.
Once it was announced that Changing Woman reached puberty and experienced her first woman menstrual, the Holy People came together, each bringing a white shell they held precious. They dressed her up in a white buckskin, adding the shells onto her dress. She stood there, glowing in such beauty and they gave her the name Yoołgai Asdzáá, White Shell Woman. Her hair was brushed and tied into a ponytail at the nape of her neck with a strip of buckskin that was cut from a deer called Doo K’aak’ehii, unharmed buckskin.
The gathering and tying of Changing Woman’s hair with the buckskin signified the importance of gathering one’s own thoughts, focus, determination and life goal accomplishments.
Changing Woman represents transformation and a rebalancing of the male and female energies in the universe. We chose her name and likeness for our organization, because we look to be a force to rebalance, create harmony, and space for ceremony in all the transformations women experience in their lifetimes.