Focusing on one of the poorest regions of Eastern Indonesia with one of the highest rates of birth-related mortality in Southeast Asia, this presentation explores the role of women as mothers in the spiritual cosmology of the Endenese from Flores Island and their inclusion in biomedical government practices. It investigates the conflictive dynamics between motherhood, kinship patrilineal systems, and ritualized prescriptions affecting women as they navigate different life stages such as female circumcision, birth and perinatal ceremonies, senescence in adulthood, and food taboos. Addressing the cosmological world of this society, the presentation also discusses non-normative witchcraft institutions embodied by women and their role as life-givers in the context of Islamic/Indigenous syncretism. Exploring issues of care and gender, epistemological dualisms, and beliefs and practices about reproduction, the study builds on long-term ethnographic fieldwork (26 months) including interviews and participant observation, along with archival research. Instances of birthing, haunting, curses, and taboo infringement are placed within an interpretive framework (animism and the ontological turn) that interpelates current religious interpretations of gender, along with “neutral/materialistic/functional” public health, and biomedical optics embodied by district, regional, and state-level discourses. To that end, the article investigates the relations between the ambiguity of the spiritual/supernatural world, the concreteness of the patrilineal kinship system as a way of redistributing resources and power often captured in local medical efforts, and the conflict between both principles. In line with the previous objective, the article challenges the male-centered view that predominates in understanding reproductive practices among the Endenese, where women are often victims/agents of the supernatural, subjected to haunting, exhibited as examples of the profane/violating the sacred, and vehicles of sanctions. Finally, the study contextualizes motherhood and the role played by mothers as agents of resistance or forms of subaltern power in resisting patrilineal ideologization and Islamic observance in modern-day Indonesia.