We talked to Jodi Darby, Erin Yanke, and Honna Veerkamp, the co-producers of Fight the Power Do No Harm—the Story of the Black Cross Healthcare Collective, launched as part of Policing Justice at PICA.
Q: Let’s start with intros. Can you tell me a bit about each of you?
A: My name is Jodi Darby. I’m a media artist and educator. I make things with moving images and photography and audio and I have been working with Erin and Honna off and on for more than 20 years now. The three of us were part of a radio collective called Circle A Radio for about ten years in the early 2000s. We did long form interviews with folks engaged in anti-authoriarian movements. I think that the three of us have really amazing chemistry as far as the ways that we think and the way we like to mix serious work with massive amounts of joy.
My name is Erin Yanke. I’m also a media artist and educator. I like documentaries of all kinds, so I do documentary work in whatever format makes the most sense. For me all media is collaborative and this particular collaboration was really fun. We know how to work with each other, and our skills match each other well and fit together like, you know, cool puzzle pieces. It’s great to have true collaboration; in a world that’s so competitive it’s really an oasis.
My name is Honna Veerkamp. I live in St. Louis these days. I used to live in Portland, where I collaborated with Jodi and Erin on the radio show that Jodi mentioned. It’s a real joy to be able to work together on another project. I’m also an artist and educator, I do media art, as well as painting and drawing and some installation audio and video stuff. And documentaries as well.
We started working together as a collective, and it’s been great to be able to collaborate for the reasons that they’ve mentioned already. But also the Black Cross Healthcare Collective, part of what we loved about this piece is that they talk so much about why being a collective was important to them and the things that they loved about working together. So it feels great to be able to have a working model that reflects the subject that we’re working on as well.
Q: How did your collaboration on the Policing Justice podcast begin?
A: Erin: We are presenting the documentary at Policing Justice, but the name of the project is Fight the Power Do No Harm—the Story of the Black Cross Healthcare Collective. This particular project started when I had coffee with Alan Rausch, one of the people we interviewed for the Black Cross project. He participated in another podcast that I had just produced called It Did Happen Here, and he was like, “Black Cross should have a podcast.” I will let anyone buy me coffee and pitch me ideas for projects. I remembered Black Cross and the work they did, and agreed to produce it with a very loose timeline. Sometime in there, Honna, I think you came to town and I told you about it.
Honna: Yeah, I was like, “that sounds great; maybe maybe I can help with that.”
Erin: Yes, it was like, oh, of course. When I told other people about it, they’re like, “oh, you got your old band back together.” It does have that vibe, it’s been so long since we got to work together.
Jodi: Yeah, it was similar for me. I feel like any project that Erin is excited about, I’m excited about too, and I was happy to attach my cart to her horse.
Erin: And, you know, I love It Did Happen Here, but also, no one on that team had done podcasts before. They’d done a lot of media projects, and Mic (Crenshaw) had a radio show, but it’s live, it’s different, you know. Honna and Jodi and I did this for over 10 years together.
We didn’t actually start interviewing people until January 2023, and we just finished the piece at the beginning of this month.
Q: What about radio and podcast as a medium complements this particular subject’s needs?
A: Honna: It centers the voice. And in this particular case, because it was primarily an oral history project, there wasn’t a lot of compelling visual material. I think that audio is more interesting than a talking head kind of video.
Jodi: Definitely. And, yeah, I mean, it’s an oral history. And I think that having it be an audio form gives it that kind of historic feeling, a kind reverence to the stories that are being told. I feel like our creative decisions can situate a story in the present or in the past. I think that having these different voices—people who are very far from each other geographically—coming together and having conversations like they’re all in the same room, was a really cool way to have the stories weave into each other. And it was really fun to have these Zoom meetings and witnessing people being like, “oh, my God, it’s you. I haven’t seen you in so long.” There was real excitement there; it made the stories become more full and more exciting and build on themselves.
Erin: And also there’s something about audio; people get to have their own experiences. It’s not like a video where we’re showing you the images that go with the ideas. Instead we are able to have our own kind of memories; it’s more participatory. And it’s more practical. Doing video interviews, editing video, it’s just more cumbersome, bigger files and stuff.
Q: Why is storytelling important for community building?
Honna: I agree with that part of it, that there’s something about radio or podcasts that when you’re listening, it draws the listener in to sort of co-create something, because they’re using their imagination in a different way. Like you’re saying, it’s not spoon fed what you’re supposed to see and imagine. And so I think that is something that can help build community, particularly when it’s about a subject that is so important to that community. We’re also trying to remember important advances that were made by this group and the specific political climate that was happening at that time. We’re trying to remember all of the community building that was happening during the time that we’re, we’re discussing, and I think telling stories is a way to preserve and share.
Jodi: Yeah, absolutely. I feel like the only way that we can imagine total liberation is by hearing stories like these. We have to share stories like these in order to keep hopelessness at bay. Stories about people coming together, identifying a problem, organizing around it, and creating real widespread systemic change. I think that we have to continue telling stories about successes, wins for the movement.
Erin: Part of what happened is that gentrification made it harder to live in Portland, people had to spend less time on art and more time making a living to pay the rent. People now try to monetize their skills more than they used to. We had time to do things for money, we had time to do things for the community, we had time to do things for love because the act of working to live wasn’t all encompassing. And so I think that we got used to doing our own community work, and then doing the storytelling about it. We were leaving a record. We didn’t do this with money; we did it with time and with skills that we already had, and we had total control over the content, with the only obligation being to the people we interviewed to really hold their story. Here’s a story that is not trying to do anything but be itself. We think it’s impactful. We think that it’s inspiring. We think that it’s a story that deserves to be told.
Q: What can listeners expect from the series?
A: Jodi: Fight the Power, Do No Harm was initially planned as a podcast. We were thinking about structuring it similar to It Did Happen Here because Erin was fresh off of that project and had a lot of recently-honed skills around how to put a podcast together. We were planning on doing six, maybe seven episodes. And then once we did all of our interviews, we just had a colossal amount of audio and we spent about a year going through it, trying to understand it, trying to decide what the topics were, what the episodes might be, how the story might unfold. And— I’ll speak for myself here—I started freaking out. I was like “‘this is so much. This is so much work.” And yet I didn’t think we had enough material to do justice to the podcast format.
At a certain point, I guess it was November of last year, I was in St. Louis visiting Honna and I told her that I didn’t feel like a podcast was the right format for this piece. I was nervous to say it because I felt like I was betraying the project.
Honna: Once we started thinking about it, we realized that all of us had some stress over the amount of work. And as we started to look deeper at it, we realized that we had a lot of repetitive stuff, the same subjects, the same stories that we were able to kind of intercut with each other. There was a lot of stuff that BCHC members talked about that was really interesting to them, and pretty interesting to us, but maybe not as compelling for someone to listen to seven hours of it. And so when we really thought of what we wanted to get out to the listener, we wanted it to be something that really packed a punch, and that felt like the most important story to tell.
Jodi: Yes, we were aware that there was some insider baseball in this piece. There’s a lot that’s exciting if you were in the, you know, Anarchist scene in Portland, Oregon in the early 2000s. But ultimately we needed to make this stuff relatable.
Erin: Yeah, and I think that one of the joys of the documentary is that you just get a bunch of tape, and then you see what you have, and then you make it what it is. So like, we couldn’t have made that call. With podcasts we were like, people love like a twenty-minute long thing. So it’s like, “great: three or four twenty-minute things,” which is about as long as it came to anyway. I think it does really have a nice flow, the one-hour format. Like, “here you go. Here’s the story.”
And it’s nice to just do it in one shot, because then you don’t have to worry about whether or not people listened to the first one. Do we have to reintroduce concepts? Do we have to reintroduce people? You know how it gets when you’re binging podcasts, which I am a fan of. It can get pretty repetitive, the recap, and then the prequel. The explanations.
When the final piece was finished, we gave early access to the people that we interviewed, which was a little nerve wracking for me. These are the people whose story we’re telling, these are the people whose opinions matter— “did we do right by you and your life and your story?” And so far, the answer is yes, and that’s really crucial to me.
The Black Cross website is still active. People can go there and read more about it, look at the actual training materials; we’ve left a lot of breadcrumbs for people to follow if they are interested. If they aren’t, then they still will have a really good basic idea of who Black Cross was when they listen to this documentary.
Honna: I hadn’t really thought about it until just now, but what we ended up producing is a little over an hour, which is really similar to the format of Circle A Radio. We used to have an hour-long, pre-produced public affairs program every two weeks, so it’s kind of nice to go back to that format. We were used to being able to put a lot into an hour, and we were able to do that again.
Erin, do you want to talk about It Did Happen Here, since you’re hosting the audio on your site?
Erin: It Did Happen Here is an 11-episode podcast with nine bonus episodes. It’s focused around the community organizing that happened in Portland, a little bit before, and mostly after the murder of Mulugeta Seraw, an Ethiopian man who was murdered by members of Eastside White Pride, a white supremacist skinhead group in 1988. White power skinheads would come to shows and there was always opposition from the punks, but when Mulugeta was murdered it really brought in other people to support what was already happening . This was happening in almost every major city, town, small town with a punk scene. The community really worked together and got the visible presence of white supremacists off the streets of Portland. We focused on three groups doing the work: the Coalition for Human Dignity (which had two future members of Black Cross involved), Anti Racist Action, and Skinheads Against Racial Prejudice (SHARP). You can listen to it at ItDidHappenHerePodcast.com.
Q: What has been the most surprising thing you’ve encountered in your experience so far?
Jodi: I made some assumptions about people’s knowledge.
Ultimately we needed to sort of reverse engineer some of the information in those interviews. We knew that we wanted this to be an opportunity for people to learn about this anti-authoritarian history within a certain time and place. And we also knew that we didn’t want to interrupt the interviews with explanations and background information. For example, we start out the piece with Alan mentioning the campaign to keep Mumia Abu-Jamal from being executed. We wanted to explain who Mumia is but we didn’t want to interrupt the flow, so we ended up creating a glossary so that we could share that information, create a fuller landscape for people to understand what was happening politically and culturally at that time, what people were responding to.
Honna: Yeah, I was gonna say the same thing. That was surprising to me, and it was a blind spot. And we were really lucky to have brilliant test listeners that gave us that feedback and who were not ignorant, who were, you know, educators, activists. And there were some things that we missed that shouldn’t have come through as common knowledge. And so yeah, the glossary will be part of our show notes on the website.
Erin: One of the things that I think is interesting is that, getting to look back on this time when Black Cross was active and then the Rosehip Medic Collective was active after that. In the summer of 2020 when protests against the murder of George Floyd happened, street medics were targeted by police in a way that I hadn’t seen before. There was a real sea change, and it felt pretty important. So getting this history more known as we’re coming into a new chapter of repression, I think is pretty important.
And the other thing that is always a little bit surprising to me is that Portland feels so different than it used to. I walk around and I look at buildings and I see what’s not there. But so many people are still here. We’ve lost a lot of infrastructure, and a lot of resources and a lot of time, but we really still have deep community ties here.
Listen to Fight the Power Do No Harm—the Story of the Black Cross Healthcare Collective here.
Policing Justice
PICA, Portland, OR
February 23, 2024 to May 19, 2024