Rural Oklahoma Birth & Wellness Initiative

Dana Bear helps ensure that the work of the Rural Oklahoma Birth & Wellness Initiative remains culturally grounded, community accountable, and guided by Indigenous knowledge. Through her leadership, partnerships with Tribal Nations and Indigenous communities are cultivated with care and intention, helping shape programs that reflect cultural traditions, community priorities, and the lived realities of Indigenous families and communities of color. Her work helps hold the cultural and relational integrity of the organization, ensuring that maternal health initiatives remain rooted in the communities they are meant to serve.

 

An enrolled citizen of the Osage Nation, Bear is from the Grayhorse District and the Buffalo Bull Face Clan. She carries German, Puerto Rican, and Black heritage and comes from a long line of Osage leaders, artists, and culture bearers. Bear is the daughter of Nelson Johnson and Angela Tallchief; granddaughter of Betty Lee McKinley and Tommy Tallchief; great-granddaughter of Nettie Kastl and Alex Tallchief; great-great-granddaughter of Eliza Bigheart and Alex Tallchief; and great-niece of Marjorie and Maria Tallchief. She currently resides in Oklahoma with her two children, Benny and Story, and remains actively engaged in Osage cultural life, including serving as a community cook in various capacities.

 

Bear comes to maternal health work through both personal experience and professional training. Navigating her own pregnancies, particularly the challenge of finding culturally aligned and affirming birth support during her second pregnancy, led her to explore the role birthworkers play in Indigenous communities and communities of color. What began as curiosity and research quickly became a calling. Though she once imagined doula work as something she might pursue later in life, the needs within her community and her own lived realities brought that future forward much sooner.

 

She is trained as a full-spectrum doula and childbirth educator through the Birthing Advocacy Doula Training program, has trained with the Oklahoma Birth Equity Initiative, and holds an Associate Degree in Native American Studies from Tulsa Community College. Bear is also a certified Indigenous Lactation Counselor (ILC). Her approach to birth work is grounded in reproductive justice, cultural continuity, and the belief that families deserve care that reflects who they are and where they come from.

 

Beyond birth work, Bear is a multidisciplinary artist, herbalist, activist, and lifelong learner. She is the founder of Tallchief Designs LLC, where she creates wearable art inspired by Wahzhaze heritage that bridges traditional and contemporary design. Her work through Tallchief & Co. extends into birth support and herbal services, emphasizing reconnection with plants, food, and land as pathways to healing and self-determination.

 

“Connecting with plants, food, and nature, and taking care of the way we bring life in and out of this world is a step forward in self-determination for communities of color,” Bear shares.

 

As an Afro-Indigenous woman, she understands how ancestral memory lives within the body, particularly in birthing bodies on these lands. Her passion lies in supporting birthing people in trusting their knowledge, using their voices, and advocating for themselves throughout their birth experiences.

 

Bear brings a perspective grounded in culture, creativity, and community accountability. She is committed to advancing models of care that are relational, culturally rooted, and led by the communities they are meant to serve.

 

Because, as she affirms, community-based care means for us, by us.

​Shamika Boone helps lead the development of a strong, sustainable rural perinatal workforce through the Rural Oklahoma Birth & Wellness Initiative. Her work focuses on preparing, mentoring, and supporting doulas and perinatal professionals who serve families across Oklahoma, ensuring communities have access to skilled, culturally responsive birth support.

 

With more than twenty years of experience as a doula, Shamika has supported hundreds of families through pregnancy, birth, and postpartum transitions while mentoring emerging birthworkers through her signature program, The Metabirthing Pathway™. Her leadership centers on strengthening the community-based birth workforce and building pathways that allow doulas and maternal health professionals to grow, lead, and sustain long-term work in their communities.

 

Shamika brings decades of experience across maternal health advocacy, child welfare systems, education, and community leadership. A graduate of Langston University, she began her public service journey with Tulsa Public Schools supporting special education students and their families. She later joined the Oklahoma Department of Human Services, where she worked in Child Welfare specializing in child protective services investigations, foster care, and adoptions. In this role she worked closely with families navigating complex systems of care and served as a Preceptor for Master of Social Work students, mentoring emerging social workers in ethical practice, trauma-informed care, and culturally responsive support.

 

Her voice and leadership have shaped maternal and child health work across Oklahoma. Shamika served as the Founding Program Manager of the Community-Based Doula Program for the Tulsa Birth Equity Initiative, now the Oklahoma Birth Equity Initiative (OKBEI), where she helped build one of the state’s leading community-driven maternal health programs. She is also the creator of the OKBEI Community Doula Summit and played a key role in securing the official proclamation of Community Doula Week in the City of Tulsa, helping elevate recognition of doulas as essential members of the maternal health workforce.

 

Beyond her maternal health work, Shamika remains deeply engaged in strengthening systems that support children and families. She has served on the Council of Voices, providing guidance on programs impacting DHS, maternal health, and child wellbeing, and currently serves as Board Chair of Fostering Connections, supporting initiatives that improve outcomes for foster and adoptive children and the families who care for them.

 

A wife and mother of two daughters, Shamika brings both professional expertise and lived experience to her work. Her leadership is grounded in the belief that every family deserves respectful, community-centered support and that investing in the people who care for families is one of the most powerful ways to improve maternal and infant health outcomes for generations to come.

Shannon Fair helps guide the vision and development of the Rural Oklahoma Birth & Wellness Initiative, bringing together lived experience, professional training, and community-rooted leadership to strengthen maternal health systems across rural Oklahoma. Her work centers on building models of care that are relational, trauma responsive, and grounded in the realities families face as they navigate pregnancy, birth, and early parenting.

 

Shannon comes to this work through lived experience and a deep understanding of what it means to navigate pregnancy, birth, and parenting without safety, stability, or adequate support.

 

At seventeen, she experienced her first birth while living in a domestic abuse situation, unhoused, and estranged from family and support systems. That birth was marked by fear, survival, and profound isolation. There were few protections, little continuity of care, and no space to process what was happening in real time. Like many young parents in crisis, she was expected to endure circumstances that no one should have to face alone.

 

Her second birth was profoundly different. Through a women and infants clinic, she experienced a model of care that was relational, responsive, and deeply supportive. For the first time, she felt held by a team that recognized her as a whole person. Traumas were addressed as they arose rather than dismissed or deferred. That care model did more than change her birth experience. It showed her what is possible when systems are designed to support people rather than manage them.

 

Even with that support, Shannon carried significant unresolved trauma into her early years of parenting. She understands firsthand that access to care does not erase the impact of complex trauma and that healing is rarely linear. Parenting can surface old wounds in unexpected ways, particularly when early experiences included violence, instability, or abandonment. This awareness continues to shape how she approaches care, education, and system change.

 

Professionally, Shannon holds a master’s degree in community counseling and brings decades of experience working at the intersection of trauma, bodies, and systems of care. Her background includes extensive work as a physical rehabilitation therapist and bodyworker, focusing on how trauma is held in the body and how healing can be supported through movement, regulation, and relational care.

 

Across her career she has developed programs, built training models, and worked in case management and community development roles. She also brings experience as a full-spectrum community-based doula, certified Indigenous lactation consultant, and certified nutrition educator.

 

Her work focuses on supporting families facing layered barriers including poverty, trauma history, discrimination, rural isolation, and limited access to services. She is particularly committed to serving individuals and families who do not feel safe, welcomed, or adequately supported within traditional systems of care.

 

Her approach moves beyond trauma-informed care, focusing instead on trauma-responsive, health-centered, and family-specific models of support that adapt to the realities each family carries.

 

Shannon believes healing requires more than education or isolated services. It requires continuity, trust, skilled support, and community.

 

Her work is grounded in the understanding that families do not fail systems. Systems fail families. She remains committed to building models of care and training that honor lived experience, address complex trauma, and ensure families are not left surviving alone when healing is possible.