Melissa Cheyney Oral History Interview, February 20, 2024

Partial Transcript: Start at the beginning, if you could just talk about your childhood a little bit? Sure, let's see, I was born in Miami, Florida in 1972. I remember growing up in a community that was largely Cuban-American. So I went to an elementary school where there were six non-Cuban kinds in the school, my sister and I and then a set of twins and then another brother and sister.

Segment Synopsis: Melissa starts by sharing about her time growing up in a largely Cuban area of Miami, Calle Ocho or Little Havana, and understanding privilege and difference as she was one of the few white kids in her school. She also talked about how drugs affected her life and family, and about her parents and family history. She talks about how she watched her sister through her birthing experience, and how she came to understand that her life would have something to do with maternal and infant health. She shares how her parents worked in education, and so her family moved around a lot. There was a brief pause in the story as she moved locations, then concludes by sharing how she spent some time in nature in the Everglades, and how her experience led her to be interested in cross-cultural experiences.

Partial Transcript: Now, you're in Oregon, obviously, so what was your pathway to get all the way across the country? Yeah. So I had, I was a total math and science nerd in high school, and I just loved my math and science teachers, and they had attended this small liberal arts school in Grand Rapids’s, Michigan called Calvin College, and they used to talk about it all the time.

Segment Synopsis: Talks about her choice to go to Calvin College for undergrad as her teachers in high school always talked about it and she wanted to go to a place with seasons. For her master’s in Anthropology she went to Western Michigan and fieldwork in Jordan during that time. She choose Western Michigan as she was interested in Forensic and Dental Anthropology. While spending time in Jordan, which she went to for quite a few years, she got to know the local midwife, who told her that she thought she was going to be a midwife. She also began to question excavating material remains in foreign countries and then bringing it back to analyses and display in the United States and how little it helps the residents of those countries attain human rights, and how she would be able to continue archaeology ethically in her career. She then went to University of Oregon for her PhD initially for Dental Anthropology to work with a well known Dental anthropologist, but ended up changing because she wanted to work with the health of living populations, and created her own program at University of Oregon. She applied to Oregon State and other places to work, but ended up going to Oregon State, and has been in Corvallis ever since. She talks again about her time at Calvin, doubling majoring with a BS in biology and BA in Ancient and European History. She ended up going on an archaeology dig to fulfill those history elective credits, and fell in love with it, and didn’t want to leave. The school was also a very rigorous and challenging, and she had to put in a lot of work.

Partial Transcript: You're a midwife now, so when did that training come in? So that, you know, I think the seeds had obviously been planted by that midwife in Jordan, but when I was in my first year of my PhD program, I really was thinking about what she was saying about access to healthcare and just, you know, some basic human rights.

Segment Synopsis: During her time in Jordan, many people were being encouraged to give up traditional care and go to the hospital that was difficult to get to. They couldn’t get there, but the government was outlawing traditional birth attendants so that made her start to consider whether that was really a good thing, requiring people to go to hospitals. Back in Eugene, she went to meet some friends at a brewery, and saw that there was a midwifery school right next door, leading her to realize that there are midwifes in the US! She looked into the school, and saw that they also trained doulas, so decided to pursue that as her skill requirement for her PhD program, as she remembered what her sister’s birth experiences were like. While doing that training, she “got hooked,” and decided to become a midwife as her second skill for her PhD. During her PhD program she also had a graduate teaching assistantship, attended midwifery school, attended births at night, and did homework at night. By 2005, she had completed her PhD and taken her National Licensing exam for widwifes and got credentialed in the State of Oregon, so she was a Certified Profession Midwife and a Licensed midwife. Her dissertation topic was on the US homebirth movement.

Inpiration for being a midwife and how she got into that from anthropology.

Partial Transcript: When I first started having an interest in births that occurred outside of the hospital, so we called those births community births—home and birth center births— it was very uncommon to do that in the United States, so about, just a little be under one percent of births since 1990 occurred outside of the hospital…

Segment Synopsis: Cheyney talks about the homebirth movement, and about how the culture of the US changed to prioritize hospital births despite the dangers. This led her to ideas like critical feminist theory and policing of the womb. She also talks about how she used to think that she had never been discriminated against as a woman, and how she came to see things in a new light after that. She then became interested in reproductive justice and other movements, and decided to seek out midwives in a state where it was a felony to train and to collect qualities and ethnographic data. She discusses learning from and studying groups that are moving against the dominant paradigm, and also how she decided to become a midwife instead of just studying midwives during this experience. She wanted to give up on her dissertation and just become a midwife, but was encouraged by the other midwives to continue because researchers were also needed as well.

Partial Transcript: When I— the model that I was trained in at U of O, a biological anthropologist often had these labs where they would bring together researchers who would— who had an interested in some biological anthropology topic. It could be forensics, it could be osteology, it could be primataology, medical anthropology. And so when I got hired here it was during a hiring freeze, so there was no negotiation of salary or anything. I remember negotiating for my startup package to involve space to have a lab…

Segment Synopsis: When starting at OSU she wanted to have a space to have a lab to build a space with collegiality and connection with colleagues. She first started the reproductive health lab as soon as she got to Oregon State, and then later started the Uplift lab with Marit Bovbjerg in 2018 or 2019 that is a research and reproductive equity laboratory. She also talked about the importance of looking at birth with a justice lens, and centering the needs of people who are made most vulnerable by systems of oppression. She also talked about how Sister Song was a big influence to here thinking. She realized that it didn’t matter how many articles she published, because people know how to create equitable outcomes at birth they just choose not to do it. Because of this they then created the Community Doula program, a doula program that is culturally and linguistically matched. She talked about how this is a great place to be a doula or a midwife, as there’s is a lot of collaboration and promotion of these ideas and their usage.

Partial Transcript: Half of my appointment is for teaching, so I teach classes. I teach medical anthropology, reproductive justice. I’ve taught osteology, human evolution, like a lot of the core classes in biological and medical anthropology…

Segment Synopsis: She talks about what he position as professor entails at OSU. Her position is 50% teaching, 40% for research, and 10% for service. Her service is fulfilled by becoming the chair for the IRB recently, which she really enjoys. She also is a mentor for a lot of graduate students, PhD students, and honors students that are also peer mentors for each other.

Partial Transcript: I also have spent some of my career focused on service outside of the university. So i was the chair of the board that oversees the practice of midwifery in the state of Oregon, Licensed Direct Entry Midwifery for six years and worked to help develop new rules and regulations to support midwives…

Segment Synopsis: She also does service outside of the University, such as being the chair of the Licensed Direct Entry midwifery, government appoint commissions, and on the Maternal Mortality Review Commission. She was also the director for the Midwives Alliance of North America Statistics Project for 12 years, which is the largest data set in the country for births that occur outside of the hospital where they are able to do lots of studies. She wanted to create data sets that were able to communicate with each other, so that midwives and obstetricians could collaborate, which her and Marit now co-direct the Community Birth Data Registry in Washington state. Her current international project is Quality Maternal Newborn Care Alliance which she co-directs with Holly Kennedy that gets researchers all around the world collaborating together. She mentions how she would like to see those who are from low income countries or most affected by the problem be given a seat at the table so that knowledge is more equitably produced.

Partial Transcript: Yeah. Well, what I hope to do is, and I have done this to some extent, make a list of the projects that I’m working on that I really care about and I’d like to see through to fruition or to be transitioned over to the next generation. I would like, I think we would all be in a much better place if we had more voices in the academy.

Segment Synopsis: She talks about her hopes of her last 13 years of her time at OSU is of bringing more voices into the academy, and how her labs are sort of a metaphor for that. She talks about US exceptionalism, and how that is often our detriment. She hopes that more voices will lead us to more sustainable and lasting solutions that don't waste money.

Partial Transcript: That is a good. I guess as I think about that, I realize, you know, i i think back when I first started here and I was the new person, like now Im probably the old guard that everybody like, hey, when are you going to retire? We need to get some fresh blood in here.

Segment Synopsis: She talks about how the department has changed to include a social justice lens over the years, and now center those who are made vulnerable in their work. She also talks about how she has had a lot of support here at OSU, despite how she had a lot of detractors in her early career. The dean stood behind her and her work, and gave her advice in the beginning.

Partial Transcript: Im trying to think of my favorite, field work experience. Gosh, there’s so many. Do you remember one from class that really stood out? All the ones with, the Amish community, I really remember. It’s so funny that you mention that, because today I, we had gone through our basement, and I found these—Im going to put my camera on so you can see this, these little Amish dolls that my clients had given me when I was a midwife to the Amish.

Segment Synopsis: Prompted about sharing her favorite fieldwork experience, she talks about some Amish dolls that she was gifted, then dives into the story. She talks about this experience where she was with an Amish woman, who wasn’t showing any signs of being in labor that we would expect in the US, but then shares that the baby is coming soon. Melissa then calls the midwife, who reassures her that is true, and that she is on her way. The Amish woman says she would hold the baby in until the midwife arrived, and hold it in she did. She shares how this experience showed her that there is a lot of cultural performativity with birth, and the way people express themselves during birth can be very different. She also shares how the woman had lost a baby before, and only wanted to have this child with a healthy body, and that this did happen and she was healed by that. She then talks about how she would take sabbaticals from midwifing, but then would agree to be someone’s midwife and have to sneak off and hide it from her family. At the time of the interview, her license was on hold, as she was being an editor in chief of a journal called Birth Issues and Perinatal Care.

Partial Transcript: Oh man, that is so stinking hard to say. I’m wondering if we should hop on another call for me to tell you that story because my class is going to start in a few minutes, and the one I wanted to tell you is not a short one.

Segment Synopsis: Prompted to share her favorite birth story that she has caught for, it is decided that a second interview will be had in order to finish out the interview, as she had a class that she had to get to.