Dr. Tibetha Kemble (Stonechild): Giving a Voice to Indigenous Mothers in Research
A Pragmatic Trial that Aims to Disrupt Birth Alerts
When Dr. Tibetha Kemble (Stonechild) left school at 15, she didn’t yet know that her path back to learning would also be a path toward leadership. Guided by the belief that “the personal is political,” she has transformed her lived experience into a powerful commitment to creating systems where Indigenous women, children, and families can thrive.
Today, through the Health Data Research Network Canada (HDRN Canada) Pragmatic Trials Training Program, Dr. Kemble is designing a trial that confronts one of the most harmful remnants of colonial policy: the continued removal of Indigenous children through birth alerts.
The Personal is Political
Dr. Kemble never met her birth mother. She was adopted at three weeks old into a loving family in Edmonton during the 60s Scoop—a government policy that saw thousands of Indigenous children taken from their families and placed in non-Indigenous homes. She is part of the indigenous family, "Stonechild," that calls Treaty 4 lands, now known as southern Saskatchewan, home.
Her adoptive parents, both educators, nurtured in her a deep sense of justice, belonging, and responsibility to others. Beyond home, however, the world reflected back the realities of systemic racism that many Indigenous youth face – often unseen and unspoken, she explains.
When her adoptive mother passed, Dr. Kemble left school at 15, a moment that would later shape her understanding of how colonial systems can constrain Indigenous potential while simultaneously revealing the strength it takes to chart one’s own path.
After nearly a decade of learning through work and life, she returned to formal education as an adult learner, earning her GED and later an accounting diploma from the Northern Alberta Institute of Technology (NAIT) and an undergraduate degree through the University of Lethbridge. There, an elective course on Indigenous Peoples’ education became a turning point: “The course was taught by a non-Indigenous person,” she recalls. “I realized there’s no reason why I should be learning about my people from a book or from someone outside the community.”
That realization became a moment of reclamation; a recognition that Indigenous knowledge, experience, and voice belong at the centre of education and research. It inspired her to pursue a Ph.D. in Educational Policy Studies at the University of Alberta, where she deepened her work on the relationships between policy, power, and Indigenous self-determination.
Since then, Dr. Kemble has served in senior leadership roles across post-secondary institutions and government, advancing initiatives that strengthen Indigenous participation and leadership in areas such as health care, education, and clinical research. Across each of these roles runs a throughline: a commitment to creating systems of learning and care that affirm the dignity, agency, and brilliance of Indigenous peoples.
Disrupting Birth Alerts
Although the 60s Scoop has ended, Dr. Kemble notes that colonial logics persist in the health care system. Birth alerts—hospital or social work flags placed on expectant mothers deemed “at risk”—continue to target Indigenous women disproportionately, “despite being banned across all provinces and territories in what is now known as Canada,” she says.
She adds: “An Indigenous woman might ask for help with housing or food during pregnancy. The request alone can trigger a flag that follows her to the hospital. When her baby is born, the child is seen as being ‘at risk’ before they even take their first breath.”
For Dr. Kemble, these alerts are not isolated incidents but extensions of settler colonialism that cast Indigenous mothers as inherently unfit. “Western systems define ‘risk’ through a material lens—poverty, housing instability—but they ignore that these conditions were created by generations of state-sanctioned poverty.”
A Pragmatic Intervention
Through her research, Dr. Kemble aims to render visible the invisible mechanisms that sustain these injustices. Her proposed pragmatic trial will test a protocol designed to interrupt the sustained (yet reconfigured to avoid detection) birth alert process within hospital systems.
The protocol tracks when, where, and by whom an “at risk” flag is placed, creating a moment of accountability that allows the birthing parent to question or challenge it in real time. “It’s about standing in front of that birth alert,” she says, “and giving Indigenous mothers the power to stop it before it happens.”
While Dr. Kemble acknowledges she “can’t change the Canadian collective consciousness about the value of an Indigenous parent overnight,” she believes change begins by forcing systems to look inward. Her partnerships with Indigenous physicians and the Women and Children’s Health Research Institute (WCHRI) will pilot the intervention at the Royal Alexandra Hospital, a major site for maternal care.
If successful, the trial could help dismantle structural bias within health care and create safer, more just spaces for Indigenous families to welcome their children into the world that was promised to them.
** The HDRN Canada pragmatic trials training program is coordinated and hosted by the Schulich School of Medicine & Dentistry and is an initiative by Health Data Research Network (HDRN) Canada. It has been funded with $3.48 million from the Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR). Read more.
