"Among the privileged few early “outsider” observers of Native American birth is anthropologist Matilda Coxe Stevenson who published on Pueblo cosmogony and “Sia Pueblo Rites With Childbirth” for the Bureau of American Ethnology in 1884. Stevenson’s historical record is perhaps the most intriguing documentation of a birthing story in Native America from that time:

The father clasped his hands around his knees, holding a stone fetich of a cougar in the palm of the right hand, and the sister-in-law, standing to the left of the woman, placed the ear of corn to the right of the sufferer’s head and blew upon it during the periods of pain, to hasten the birth of the child. The prayer that was blown into the head was supposed to pass directly through the passageway of life.… The woman would sit for a time either upon a low stool or a chair, and then pass about in evident pain, but no word of complaint escaped her lips; she was majestic in her dignity…all minds seemed centered on the important event to come. It was a sacred hour, too sacred for spoken words.…

Today, Native American women of the Southwest tribes—including nine Pueblo communities of New Mexico—have, along with Alaska Natives, the lowest primary cesarean delivery rate of all populations in the United States."

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Tekatsitsiakwa Katsi Cook: Southwest Tribes’ Women Have Cesarean Births at Lowest Rate in U.S. (Indian Country Today 11/2)