Honoring a Lullaby, a Loss, a Heritage
As we enter Native American Heritage Month this November, I find myself drawn to a soft, ancient song: the Lakota Lullaby. The lullaby drifts across time, carrying the voices of the Lakȟóta people—tender, sorrowful, protective. It holds within it the cradle of a mother’s voice and the whisper of the child she holds. And yet, for many birthing people, birth and lullaby are not always paired in life-retaining stories. In the sacred space of perinatal loss, the lullaby becomes an elegy, the cradle a memory.
In this blog post for Solmaterna, I invite you into a reflection where the lullaby meets the body, where grief is embodied, and where heritage calls us back to a larger map of loss, resilience, and belonging.
The Lullaby and Its Echoes
The Lakota Lullaby, also known in Lakȟóta as Čhaŋté Wašté Hokšíla (“my kind-hearted boy”), carries lines of lull and promise, love and protection. YouTube+2YouTube+2 As we listen to the flute tones, the voice, the space between the notes, we are pulled into a relation that is more than sound—it is lineage, language, lull, and loss.
For those of us working in perinatal spaces, especially within BIPOC communities, this lullaby invites a deeply layered contemplation: the cultural inheritance of lullabies, the intergenerational grief of Indigenous communities, and the personal grief of perinatal loss. Within that convergence, we find a potent invitation: to hold what was expected, what was lost, and what remains in the body.
In the voice of the lullaby we hear promise: “Sleep, my little one. I keep you safe. I sing you home.” Yet when loss intervenes—when the cradle is empty, when the body remembers differently—the lullaby does not end. Instead it morphs. It becomes a container for grief. It becomes a murmured memory in the body’s subterranean chambers.
Embodied Grief: The Body as Archive
In our work, we often speak of grief as emotion, as a process, as a timeline. Yet contemporary grief scholarship invites us to the body. To the way loss does not just exist in the mind, but in the muscles, the breath, the internal rhythms. That is the essence of embodied grief theory.
One recent article notes that the bereaved person’s body “is not just a passive performer but carries symptoms, sensations, and memories of the loss.” SAGE Journals+1 Grief becomes something we live in the body—not simply something we think about. For a mother who has experienced perinatal loss, the womb-space may hold both absence and memory; the chest may still cradle the echo of that lullaby; the arms may yearn for a cradle that’s no longer occupied.
For Indigenous communities—especially the Lakȟóta—the body also holds historical and collective grief. Maria Yellow Horse Brave Heart, a Hunkpapa & Oglála Lakȟóta scholar, articulated how the body and community carry historical trauma and unresolved grief—grief that crosses generations, territories, and relationships. Wikipedia When we bring perinatal loss into that field, we are honoring layers of grief: personal, ancestral, communal, body-based.
So the lullaby becomes more than a song. It becomes a resonant space where the body remembers what words cannot hold. Where we say: yes, the child did not wake up; yes, the body held hope; yes, the heritage calls us into a larger web of belonging; yes, the body still sings its lullaby even in grief.
Native American Heritage Month: A Time to Reflect & Connect
This month invites us to pause and consider: what does it mean to honor Indigenous heritage in our perinatal work? What does it mean to recognize that lullaby, that voice, that grief, and to hold space for it in a trauma-informed, culturally responsive way?
Acknowledge the land and lineage – Begin by acknowledging Indigenous ancestors and the land we sit on. This is a first gesture of respect and connection.
Hold multiplicity of loss – Recognize that grief in Native communities often carries not just the immediate loss but the weight of colonization, forced removal, and cultural erasure.
Embodied practices – Encourage practices that invite the body’s voice: breathwork, gentle movement, ritual silence, or singing that lullaby (or a version of it) as a way to awaken embodied remembering.
Create ritual containers – A simple ritual: light a candle, sing softly, place a blanket or cloth in honor of the child. Allow the body to feel, even when words fail.
Build bridging narrative – For BIPOC women experiencing perinatal loss, integrate cultural remembering: the lullaby is not just theirs, it is ancestral. Their grief is not isolated—it connects to a lineage of mothers, daughters, daughters-in-law, ancestors.
A Reflection & Invitation
If you are reading this as a mother who has experienced perinatal loss, let this lullaby be an extension of your body’s song. Place a hand on your belly, or on your chest; feel the subtle thrum of memory. Whisper your lullaby—perhaps that line from the Lakȟóta song, perhaps your own words. Let it travel across time.
If you are a therapist, consultant, educator working with BIPOC communities, invite clients (when appropriate) to witness the lullaby, to embody it, to gently explore its resonance. Use it as a bridge between embodied grief and cultural heritage.
Allow the body to say what the mind cannot yet articulate. Allow the lullaby to be sung in absence and presence. Allow the heritage to hold the loss.
Closing Reflection
In the quiet hum of the lullaby, in the soft folds of our grief-bearing bodies, there is healing. Not the forgetting. Not the “moving on.” But the living with. The body that holds both absence and love. The heritage that holds both trauma and resilience. The lullaby that sings of cradle and of sky.
This Native American Heritage Month, may we listen. May we honor. May we hold our grief in body and song.
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