[Photo: Martine demonstrates an eye flush procedure for someone who's been tear-gassed or pepper sprayed with the help of fellow street medic, Jaxx H. Photo courtesy of Tony Alvarado-Rivera.]
Damon Williams (Dame): Welcome to One Million Experiments.
Daniel Kisslinger (Kiss): A podcast showcasing and exploring how we define and create safety in a world without police and prisons. I'm Kiss.
Dame: I'm Dame.
Kiss: We are happy to be back rolling on this episode three of season two. We have an amazing conversation coming for you, but as always, we got to bring our partner in decriminalization, our co-pilot into the conversation, Eva Nagao from Interrupting Criminalization. How are you today?
Eva Nagao: Hey, y'all. I'm so glad to be here today. Your science metaphor finally took off in this episode. You know everyone's been waiting for it-
Kiss: That's big stuff happening.
Eva: -and here we are.
Kiss: Eva, who are we talking to today?
Eva: Today we have the pleasure of talking to one of the co-founders of Ujimaa Medics, Martine Caverl. Ujimaa Medics are a group of Black community organizers, activists, pastors, healthcare professionals, mothers, brothers, sisters, fathers, cousins, and friends of African descent in Chicago who offer training in urban emergency first response. Primarily to people who live in or love people who live in communities where shootings often occur.
Ujimaa Medics or UMedics train people in how to care for shooting victims until an ambulance arrives, including caring for the victim, and training in how to handle crowds, and how to communicate effectively with police and paramedics. The training now includes lessons on how to treat those suffering from an asthma attack, those dealing with seizures, and as we get into the episode, we're going to learn more about what they're up to now.
This is a big one for us. This was a real inspiration for Million Experiments, and we hope it's going to be a real inspiration for everyone else, too.
Dame: Always love the home team. Shout out to all the folks at UMedics. We're really excited to share this conversation with you all because it has been such an important example and experiment for our community.
Kiss: You can learn more, get in tune, and sign up for a training at umedics.org if you're based here in the Chicago area. You can also follow them at UmedicsChi on all socials. All right, with that, you all ready?
Dame: Let's hop into the lab.
Kiss: Here we go.
[music]
Dame: We are here. We are back. We are hopping in the lab with really one of the most important projects and practices not only in our national landscape but in my own personal consciousness and imagination of what is possible in the world that we are trying to create. We got one of the co-founders of UMedics with us here, Martine Caverl.
Martine Caverl: Hey.
Dame: Martine, we like to start our conversations in a tradition with our two-part question, and it's centered around time. You can define time however you will this hour, this day, this season, this lifetime. In this time, Martine, how is the world treating you and how are you treating the world?
Martine: The world is worlding and what that means is that I am doing fine. I had a conversation with someone yesterday that led to me in my imagination having a picture and speak to my own self 20 years from now. In that conversation, 62-year-old Martine said, "We made it chill." So I'm chilling.
Kiss: That's beautiful. Before we get into the project, I'm curious, what else do we know about 62-year-old Martine? What's she up to if everything goes according to plan or the way you'd like it to go?
Martine: I tried to ask her a bunch of questions. How is this person? How is that person? Did we end up doing this? Did we end up doing that? She was like, "No, we're not doing all that. Calm down with all those questions. We made it.
[laughter]
Meaning you made the right decision so just do your thing. You know the things you need to know."
Dame: What a grounded truth to have, that's such a gift for yourself to be able to walk with. If we're able to look to the future, which I think we're going to come back and do, I want to swing us back a little bit and investigate the soil from which UMedics emerged. The way we do that here is we like to ask the hypothesis of the work. When you got your science experiment and you are about to do something, there is a--
You know what a hypothesis is. In beginning this project of grassroots skill building up to address the impacts of gun violence, to address the impacts of asthma, and environmental hazards, what was the original hypothesis for the work of UMedics? Also, we'll talk about the name, but let's get to the hypothesis first.
Martine: I would distill it down to where Black people have high-quality training and they have confidence based on that training and based on being part of a community and network of support, and where they have the motivation which already exists. We don't give people the motivation, they bring it with them. Where they have those three elements, they will respond and they will act in a way where they can help protect the lives and well-being of the people in their surroundings and the people they care about.
These are the people that we actually need to stand in that gap where Black people are failed by the public health and safety systems. From that foundation, we can build conditions for self-determined health in our communities.
Kiss: I want to flash out this word health a little bit, because I think one of the ways that health system fails is by not having a broad enough definition of what that word means. For you all, when you say health, what does that mean?
Martine: One reason I appreciate you asking that question is because when we started, we started with an idea that became the curriculum for our basic gunshot wound first response training. Some people, they have a hard time making a connection between the training work we do related to gunshot first response to the other kinds of work we do, which includes asthma community care and seizure community care, and protest defense street medic training.
We're going to be collaborating with another organization to offer birth emergencies workshop. They have a hard time drawing a line between those things because what? I think because they have a hard time seeing health in a 4D kind of way. I'll speak for myself. In order for me to feel healthy, I need many things. I need to feel hydrated, I need to feel alert, I need to have my basic needs met for food, clothing, and shelter. I need rest.
I need a lot of these things to help my individual body organism survive and do well. I have a hard time feeling healthy completely, however, when I'm surrounded by conditions of other people not having that same health and having that same access. Even if I'm able to be okay within my body, if I live in a society where people I care about, people that are close proximity to me, they're not feeling healthy, they're not having a rest, they're not feeling safety. They're not feeling well, they're not having access, it's hard for the individual to actually be healthy where everyone doesn't have that same access to health.
There's a rest that's not just about ability to sleep and sit down. It's the ability to just have time and space to think and imagine and engage in pleasure and have those things. That matters for health too. Then, of course, if you're going through a crisis, you need access to assistance to get you through that crisis. Health means a lot of things, and so we look at it in a complex way.
Dame: It makes me think of the Ujimaa of it all. For folks who aren't familiar, UMedics is short for Ujimaa Medics. Ujimaa is the Swahili word for collective work and responsibility. I bring that up because the thing you articulated so eloquently, I think a lot of people can know consciously or know in their body, that, "My health is connected to those around me." Most of us passively accept the sickness and dysfunction and lack of health and just suffer through that, but knowing that it's not right.
Kiss: For lots of reasons largely related to money and time I think are
Dame: Myself included. It's not a judgment. I would love to know what prompted that knowing into action or how that knowing came from action of we see a crisis around us and now we're going to do something about it.
Martine: That's a good question. In order for us-- so when I say us I'll start with me and Shree. Shree's the co-founder. It was us talking the reason why were even able to have those conversations about what we wanted to do that became medics is because of foundations we already had. In order for us to say, "Oh, we can do this thing," we needed to have seen something that showed us that it was possible. We needed some data from which to draw up one for our hypothesis. We had some data. We came in with some data already.
Kiss: Extended metaphor.
Dame: You doing it, you do it. Let's go.
[laughter]
Let's rock.
Kiss: What was the data that y'all had coming into this?
Martine: Definitely data from our lived experiences. I don't want to speak for her. I'll try to speak mostly from me and maybe I'll say a few things that I know were true for her. We were both organizers. As organizers that meant that we were spending time in something UMedics call deep community with folks really trying to understand what motivates people to take collective action. Why do we believe that we can do this? Why do we believe that we can actually take action that shifts power in the direction of people who we don't traditionally think of as having political power? We had to see something.
For me, I took inspiration from a lot of places. Definitely from my family. One thing that I had experienced as a young person, and then I got some more context later was related to one of my heroes, one of my north stars.
Someone that almost every day I'm like, I wish I could talk to her. My grandmother, my mother's mother named Thelma died when I was pretty young. By the time I was old enough to know what questions I want to ask her she wasn't around. I'll just try to learn what I can from her life and apply that.
She was a quiet force in her community. She lived in the rural southwest part of Mississippi. In that community, she was one of the people who did missionary work, but the missionary work was really like service work. What a lot of the folks would call mutual aid work. That's what she did. We just had to rely on each other because this was the segregated Jim Crow. There was a hospital. It was a segregated hospital, so they had the white wing and the black wing and it was shit in that black wing.
She would go around and she would check on the sick in the area, the elderly in the area. I found out after I already went through doula training and started going to birth to myself that she was also serving as a postpartum doula what we call that, but they didn't call it that then. She would be taking food, medicine and just giving some attention and care to new families. My mom was the youngest, so my mom had to go along with her. My mom tells me about having to wash dirty diapers for these new babies outside. She didn't like that at all.
It was a lot of these traditions that I think a lot of people listening can identify with. These traditions of collective work and responsibility. These traditions of figuring out how we're going to help take care of each other. My grandfather had a lot of healing knowledge that he had to use to help his children, help his family because they weren't going to that hospital. It was these traditions of having these networks, having knowledge, spreading it that helped us to survive and have some joy and love and good times and wellness in our lives.
Those traditions that were alive in our communities wherever your families came from. Mine in Mississippi, Shree's family has roots in Alabama. Apart from that when I got older and learned more about what was going on in the world, I came into a couple more things. For example, when Hurricane Katrina happened in New Orleans. Well, the whole Gulf Coast, but it really hit New Orleans really bad. This was 2005. I don't know how many listeners were around for that.
Kiss: I don't know. I feel like our younger and they might have been babies around that point. I feel like we don't have that many-
Martine: I don't know all the time.
Kiss: If you were born after 2005 hit us up.
Dame: Yes, hit us up. Let us know.
Kiss: This isn't a TikTok. We might have some people who are--
Martine: Okay, good. I don't know. I'll be like, "Yes...center," they'll be like, "What" [laughs]. Hurricane Katrina came through New Orleans in 2005. The city is flooded. People are struggling to survive. There was a particular news story where it had coverage of this white couple and they're waiting through shoulder-deep water. They're carrying food that they had just taken from a store that had been busted open. News covers like, "Oh, look at this couple, they went and they found food." Then same scene, I think it was same store a couple of black people, I think a couple of them were kids. "Look at these looters. They're looting stores."
That's happening. Then it was mostly black people that were seeking relief after having abandoned their homes.
Then they were being referred to as refugees. There was a conversation at the time about how well refugees usually refer to people who have to leave their country of origin and seek asylum or relief in another country. Black people in New Orleans are being referred to in this language. Now that goes on perfectly with what some of our elders had the saying, which is that black people don't have full citizenship in this country, and we haven't from the beginning.
It didn't really get much closer to citizenship until the Voting Rights Act, but we still see these acts of reinforcing that black people are not actually full citizens here. You have all that happening. At that time there was an organization that already been doing grassroots organizing in New Orleans and was led by some people who had ties to student non-coordinated committees. They were like, "Yes, we need people of color to come down to New Orleans and help with the relief and organizing efforts." It was because that call came out that me and someone else very near and dear to me went down there.
The Hurricane happened in September, we went down there in December. It was being there and seeing, I would say their hypothesis is if we stay here and we get through this together and we stay in our homes and we stay in our neighborhoods we can anchor our neighborhoods so that black folks can actually hold on to our culture and our space here. A lot of homes were destroyed completely. The other reason why they asked for help was because the city had passed some ordinance saying that people who hadn't gutted their homes out by a particular date would have their homes seized.
Actually went back there a couple of times to A, help get the water out, help organize, help canvas, help reach and find people who are still there and get help to get the network together but also to go in these homes and get them gutted out. One really important thing is the reason I went to New Orleans was because there was a request to go. That's been pretty important to me too in terms of where and how do we organize. I've really tended to show up where people are asking people to show up.
Kiss: Can you talk a little bit more about what that organizing by request makes possible, or by invitation I think is really the term?
Martine: Yes, by invitation. Getting back to my Ada Twist, Scientists situation where we're throwing out hypotheses and testing them out. Another hypothesis I think that we operate on is that in order to create alternative competing stronger systems to the current systems of violence and incarceration, relationships have to be build, relationships have to be strong, relationships have to be authentic, and relationships have to be trusting. We need efforts and experiments, alternatives that people can trust, can trust to be there, can trust that will do what they say they're going to do. What the invitation says is that our community has decided that we need support in these specific ways, and that means that the community is there, they're still in control in terms of what happens in their setting.
If I'm inviting people, I'm deciding who's invited, and I'm deciding for what reasons I'm inviting, and I'm deciding how those folks will be deployed once they're here, and I'm taking some responsibility as it relates to what happens to them and what happens in my community as relates to this invitation. For the people who respond, there's a relationship being forged there. If I'm showing up a response to a call and I'm showing up at your doorstep, that means I'm giving over my purposes for being here. I'm merging those with your purposes. There is some trust that's built with that. If I just show up out of nowhere, what does that mean for the relationships? I was talking to someone about this yesterday.
Kiss: You had some good conversations yesterday.
Martine: It was the equinox. What can I say about it? It was a big day. [chuckle] Make your plans carefully next year. Relationships, sometimes the collaboration starts. There's not really much of a relationship there, but there's some foundational values that are shared and you can connect on those due to collaboration, and from there the relationship really grows and blossoms deepens. There's so much more that can be built off for that.
One thing I shared yesterday that never fails me is if the relationship precedes a collaboration. You connect on values, you connect on principles, you get to know each other, you build relationship, and then on that foundation, it comes a collaboration. I think that it can happen in both directions, but in my experience, I've seen better come out of the second scenario where the relationship proceeds the collaboration and the invitation that relationship bond is stronger, which can lead to stronger institutions, stronger systems, stronger solutions, more resilient, better-functioning organizations, and efforts.
Dame: I really like that. In that notion of intentional relationship building through the method of invitation. One, being prepared to receive that and prioritize that in terms of when and where we show up, but also the wherewithal or the knowing to make the invitation. When you win into who do you offer the space to come and join you in work that's needed in your community, it is a skill that has to go both ways to be effective. I think that's something folks listening could really pull from.
The thread you just had was so rich that I even just want to pull out a few things to connect back to the work as it's happening now. One, this notion of there's a value of having data in building new projects and that some of the data that you're carrying is from the traditions of our cultural lineages. In those traditions, you'll find so many of the same structural realities that exist today. One, the methods of mutual aid and care, but also I heard you naming your recognition of early health inequity through Jim Crow apartheid fascism. I'm interested in how those vestiges still show up today.
You named the white wing and the black wing. It may not be as distinct as that, but there is a white wing and a black wing, and then also there's I think, class wings that exist in our current health reality. I want to take all of that rich methodology you just gave us into the practice of how did those relationships and how those data show up within the health inequities that existed here as you all came into the world as this powerful movement-based organization.
Martine: What you said reminded me of a couple of things. One, so there's this book that was made into a movie...made into a movie, I think the name of the book--
Dame: You love it.
Martine: [chuckles] I like that movie. The movie I'm thinking about is The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks. I didn't actually see the movie. I've seen Beloved. I didn't see this movie, but I read the book.
Dame: Okay, you read the book, you're better than me.
Martine: Look at me reading books. [chuckles] It was a famous book written by a white author. Anybody sounds familiar. Henrietta Lacks was a Black woman, born in Virginia, moved to Baltimore, and died of cervical cancer. Pretty sure she was under the age of 40. She went for treatment at Johns Hopkins Hospital. As part of the treatment, they took cell samples from her cervix and grew them in cultures after she'd already died of cervical cancer. The reason the book is called Immortal Cells is because these cells-- cells have a life cycle. These cells didn't seem to have the same life cycle as other cells. These cells wouldn't die. They took these cervical cells they were going to use in maybe by now a million experiments, I don't know, but lots of experiments and they were able to create treatments for lots of different kinds of conditions.
They were able to innovate health practices. They were able to study how these cells operated in I think the International National Space Station. All kinds of people use these cells to develop all kinds of health technologies. Again, it was Black woman who died, I think the four days of 40 of cervical cancer. At the time that I looked it up, and I really don't think it's any different now. This I think was 2012 when I last looked at the data on these Black women, they're still most likely to die from cervix cancer in this country after all that. This is a situation we find ourselves in. It's important for Black people not to sit there in that. I think that happens sometimes. I'm a registered nurse.
Dame: Were you already a registered nurse when you started UMedics?
Martine: Yes. Thanks for that question. I was not a registered nurse at the time that we created the idea for UMedics, but we didn't actually really start it until I was already a nurse. I went to Johns Hopkins for nursing school. I lived in Baltimore. After I came back, we actually started organizing. What I was going to say is that it's important the Black people not sit in the muck of the tragedy. That we not absorb the idea that some people still have that there's something wrong with us and that's why we experience health disparities.
Sometimes you need data for that. For some people, the only data they need is self-love, and for other folks, they need a little bit more than that to believe that we can get out of this. In addition to some of the things I already named, I was able to see how other people had dealt with these situations. I'd had opportunity to go out of the country. I had a chance to visit [unintelligible 00:28:19] which is the home of the Deputies Liberation Communities, liberated territories. I had a chance to bear witness to how they organize their health system based on the autonomy of their people, but also the help of a lot of international solidarity.
Again, invitation, this is what we need, this is what you can contribute, and how they were able to build a system that was trying to combine the best of what people were able to find through international efforts to study health conditions and study solutions. Put that together with their indigenous cultural knowledge and what was available to them in their immediate environment and that they were accessed through their ancestral traditions.
They were to combine that and support the health of their people in that way. Shree and I both had an opportunity to meet Dr. Luther Castillo, I think who's currently the minister of Health for Honduras but that was a long path. He was educated at the Cuban Medical School and went home and together with lots of people. He's just a guy I met. They created a hospital for the [unintelligible 00:29:36] of people of Honduras who had been traditionally excluded from a lot of larger Honduran Society because of racism forces in the Honduran government, were suspicious of their political activities. They needed to create a self-system that brought world-class knowledge, skills, and tools to the people, and again, integrated it with the knowledge tools and systems that already existed amongst the people to create the optimal conditions for health for them. So many things, but those two also stand out as being influential. I would say my interest in emergency preparedness and as a topic, in general, was due to living in New York City in September of 2001. I would take too much of the time talking about that, but living there was very influential on me being interested in emergency preparedness.
Then, like I said, we were organizers. We were both in this organization called RSH for short Rising and Solidarity with Haiti. We came together after the earthquake in Port of Prince Haiti happened in 2010 and what we were doing, we were trying to organize funding for grassroots Haitian or Haitian-American-led organizations because American Red Cross and Clinton Foundation, some of these big organizations were stuck in up a lot of money and resources in using non-profit charity infrastructure to really control Haitian politics.
We wanted to talk about some accountability related to that, but also educate people about the importance of Haiti for black people. Anybody interested in freedom anywhere in the African diaspora. We were doing that work and then just living our lives and being in Chicago, again, I think the reason we started with gunshots is because I had an opportunity to learn first aid through the outdoor leadership skills project and was being mentored by a veteran paramedic.
I was learning some of these skills and it was important to me to share some of these skills with people that I cared about. I actually remember going to this protest against American Red Cross. Another person who was there at the protest was Dian Turner, and he was organizing with STOP, which stands for Southside Together Organizer for Power, and an organization that he helped to found Hot Fly, which means feel leaving by the youth.
That was the last time I saw him alive was at this Red Cross protest.
I turn around and next thing I hear was that he had even shot in the back a few blocks away from University of Chicago Medical Center and that he had died in an ambulance on the way to-- I think it was Northwestern, which for people who were not in Chicago is in complete other side of town. University Chicago Medical Center is a very well-known medical school and is sitting there in the middle of the south side, but this person who was shot 17 years old could not go to get care there because they didn't have the type of trauma center necessary to treat him.
What if someone had been there who knew how to provide first aid to this kind of injury? I don't know if that could have saved his life or not. We never know, but it could have given him a fight and chance, but also back to the hypotheses. What is the effect on witnesses to an act of violence when that act of violence is met with an act of love and power, and what impact can that have on the community? That's when we start talking about, we really need to develop a way to spread these skills to our people. One of our founding principles UMedics is quality and integrity. I was like, "I'm going to go to nursing school real quick. Let me make sure we know what we're talking about." I do that and I come back.
Kiss: Let me just get trained in how to save people's lives real quick. Just give me a second. I'll be right back.
Martine: Honestly, I was already enrolled. People were getting shot, people were getting stabbed, people were getting limbs amputated because of diabetes, people were dying of asthma. People were getting HIV, people were struggling with their mental wellness. All these things were already happening, we were already in this. It was just a lot going on. Y'all call these one million experiments. There’re all kinds of things that people can do related to shifting power and transforming conditions.
The conversation for me and Shree was, "What is it that the two of us and the people we know with the skills that we know and have, what can we do? What if we don't do it will not happen?" We got together and we said, "Okay, let's do this." I hosted the first workshop in my living room with some friends and family. We learned together. Then we said, "Okay, let's figure out how to actually take this out to the public." We started just asking people like, "Hey, would you be interested in learning this? Would you be interested in learning this?"
Finally, Ferguson happens, Mike Brown, rest in peace, rest in power and there's a lot of energy. We were contacted by some folks who were connected to We Charge Genocide here. They were like, "Yes, we're going to be at the Freedom School. We're going to do basically a cop watch workshop. Can y'all come through and also train on Gunshot Wound Response ?" We were like, "Yes, we can." We didn't have a name for the organization. We didn't have any of those things. We were like, "Well, this is what we know."
We got together with a couple of other people who were like, "All right, let's do this." We came up with the logo name, founded principles, started planning a train-to-trainer, met these sisters from Oakland who were doing very similar work. We started talking to them and just finding that community, finding people who were like, "Yes, we want to join and we want to help." We ended up officially launching in April 2015. We based the workshop, this Gunshot Wound Response workshop on the idea that you might not have any money to buy all these fancy supplies. You might not know what a tourniquet is, but there's stuff that you might have in your wallet, in your pocket, in your diaper bag, in your backpack, in your purse that you can actually use to help save someone's life, but the most important thing you have is what's in your head and your heart.
We're going to base training around that. Like I said, we were meeting people's houses, we were seeing what we had around the house. We got some taxi pads. Let's train on this. Fast forward to 2019. At that point, I think we had trained 1200 people all completely volunteer living rooms and backyards, and doing it like that. Then 2020 hits and we pivoted because one we wanted to bring some workshops online and that's also when we started doing our protest defense training series.
Until that point, we were pretty specific about community bystander training. A lot of the street medic collectives in North America tend to be focused on direct action, tend street medics to the rally, to the sit-in to the occupation, hunger strikes, stuff like that. We said, "Well, that's not really what we are training people on. We just did it as part of street medic groups that were more focused on that," but when 2020 hit, we realized, we really need a black-focused street-medic training, and we couldn't figure out where there was one. UMedics developed a training and trained some folks up. Though was hard. [chuckles] I'll just say that. It was hard and I was tired, y'all, but it was good.
Kiss: One, thank you for showing how this work has evolved and I think one of the things that is a takeaway from me, from hearing all that is similar to this idea of invitation, so much of what you just shared evolved related to the need and the space that there was no one to fill. That was the question you named is, what can we do if we don't do it, we don't know who would be doing that. That seems like a really good question. For people with whatever skills they're bringing to the table.
Dame: I think you're naming it. The people who are doing the work are the ones that are closest to a solution. I get really frustrated with the macro conversation around gun violence and how that conversation is always propagandized or theorized toward investment into police and incarceration. I want to tell you a little story. Let me just throw one little thing about the cops, right? I hate to do it, but it's burning in me. In 2020, you're naming obviously this need for black street medics, for folks who don't know, I don't like over-talking about the story, but I was arrested and harmed in the beginning of uprising in a significant way. I spent a lot of time in the back of police station. It was a room of 90% black cops who were the ones that were just brutalizing us, but for some reason, they had this burning desire to prove to me that they were good guys or good people, while they were being assholes to me. It was a really bizarre experience.
One story that our officer told, which resonated because for years I've been hearing about people being shot, whether it's somebody connected to the drill music scene, or just somebody who's thought of to be connected to the streets and cops standing over them, watching them die, or saying really brutal vulgar things. That is something that I've heard a lot growing up. What this officer was trying to prove to me is, I'm a good guy because it's not in my job to do anything when someone gets shot. I took a first-aid training and I bring a tourniquet. I haven't sometimes responded, and done first aid work on the scene, so you should not think what you think about police.
In me hearing that, it's like, yes, sure, you can have had a conscious in a moment, but what you just revealed to me is your job is not to respond to gunshots. That is within your discretion and y'all can choose and choose all the time to do nothing. In saying that personal anecdote, that story and how clear that was to me, for you as someone who has trained literally 1,000 people to respond to this, and now have more data of what really happens on the ground. For folks who are concerned about gun violence from a UMedics abolitionist-facing lens, how do you think about how we should approach or understand how to build solutions? That's a big question. Don't have to have it all-
Martine: Thank you for the question. We get that question in workshops sometimes. We cover lots of things, but we recognize that the actual hands-on first aid skills aren't the only kind of skill you need to respond to that kind of emergency in our neighborhoods, or even if not in our neighborhoods if there's a Black person involved. If there's a Brown indigenous person involved, even it changes the situation. In addition to first aid actual skills, you also need skills related to how to deal with the police when they come, and also how to deal with the 911 system.
Often in the police part of the workshop, we get the question, "Well, shouldn't we advocate for police to have to provide first aid?" Our response is:
a) That's not their job.
b) It shouldn't be, we shouldn't rely on them to do that.
We're training community bystanders because community bystanders will be better at it than police because police, I have and a lot of us in the organization have a different viewpoint understanding about the role of police and communities than maybe some other folks. Police is not their job to actually protect anybody. I'm going to say that again, person listening, it is not the police's job to protect you. I'm not saying this from some revolutionary marxist piece, no. That's what the law says.
Try to sue a police department for not protecting you, and you wasted your money. It is not their job or role to protect individual people. If they won't protect white people, you think they're going to protect us? We protect us, and we need skills in order to do that more effectively because we know that we cannot rely on them. They might decide every once in a while if they're going to help, but:
a) It's the best kind of help.
A lot of them don't have first aid training and even if they did, could you actually rely on them to do it in the best way, even if you made it their job? Our hypothesis is, no, you cannot. Trained community, motivated, caring bystanders will do much better at helping to extend the chance that someone's going to survive after that serious injury. Police are trying to control a crime scene. Police have served as barriers to community bystanders who even wanted to help.
We can go back to 2015. We don't even have to talk about Chicago. There's some things I can say about Chicago, but a public story we all know about is related to what happened to Michael Brown. He didn't die right away, they had him out in the middle of the street, and they wouldn't let anybody go over there because it would disrupt the crime scene. I was personally in a situation where I was at a funeral, some people who didn't rock with the person that we were there to mourn came and shot up the funeral. In the process of that, one of the young men was hit. I provided first aid to this young man.
When the police came, one of the police officers actually did come over to help, but I was already there, and already kind of got the situation under control. Again, you need trained bystanders. That's one situation.
Recently one of our membership meetings, we looked at the Interrupting and Criminalization's document beyond, "Do No Harm." We looked at the principles and looked at the study guide, and the questions. We had a conversation. There weren't a lot of us, we're not a big organization. Everybody shared some personal experience with police being a barrier to someone accessing, care either after being shot, after being seriously wounded, or going through a mental health crisis.
We can't just go off of anecdotes, if we're trying to be scientific about this. We have to zoom out and look at the whole landscape, and see what the trend is. The trend is that they're service barriers. It's a nice news story, and it's nice when any individual person steps up to help someone in an emergency. You have to look at the whole landscape, and that anecdote doesn't tell the full story. If we're trying to solve some big problems, we have to actually look and see what the scope of the problem really is. The scope of the problem tells us that we have police service barriers. We also have to look and reexamine what is their role in communities, and what is the role of people in the community.
What do we actually need in order to feel safe in communities? What do we need in the community for people to be proud of being there, want to stay there, want to be embedded there, want to believe in their community? That goes completely beyond the role of a police officer. We have to build that, and that's hard work. It's lengthy and it's not done in isolation. We need a million experiments because we can now rely upon the fact that there are some pieces that are being picked up by others. There's some things that Let Us Breathe is doing that we don't have to do, Let Us Breathe is that. Look at them. We can rely upon the fact that we are part of a network of community, that there's enough of us doing different things our different ways. Finding points of collaboration and finding points of unity, working toward the same goals. Situations where we can focus in, and figure out what do we need to build, how do we build in order to create actual safety in our communities.
Kiss: It brings me back to something that you said in y'all's origin story of what are the skills we have that if we don't do, there won't be another person to do. If there's this wider movement of people doing that for the skills that they bring, then the question of capacity becomes a little bit less important or this version of abundance that feels a little bit less, like a winging a prayer. Who, the we, and what we can bring, expands the more people who participate.
You and Martine doesn't have to do everything, you can do the thing that you are driven to do, called to do, and the skill that you want to contribute to the movement. That's a more reasonable ask of someone if we want them to participate, then, hey, solve all the problems or do fill all the roles. It's what is the thing you do, and how can that contribute to the liberation movement?
I think with that, I want to move toward wrapping up. Part of our tenuous scientific method, we just thank you for rocking with. I know we have our own skepticism about it, but it ends with conclusions. I'm wondering for you, obviously the work will keep evolving, but this many years in, what are some of the conclusions you've come to about what the work of UMedics makes possible in building safety in a world without police and prisons?
Martine: I started earlier talking about being 20 years. Sometimes it's hard for me to envision what could happen, be real in the next five years. There's a lot happening in the country right now that makes things tenuous, and makes me wonder about the future. One thing that helps me feel more secure is the knowledge that I'm loved and cared about by a lot of people, but also people that know stuff. I've got a nice little squad going.
[laughter]
Dame: That's great. That's real. That is a privilege.
Martine: Yes, so real.
Dame: [laughs] Knowledgeable care. Care is one thing, but some informed care--
Martine: Yes, know what you're doing, know what you're talking about.
Dame: That's good.
Martine: I'm cared for by a lot of people who know what they're talking about, and know what they're doing. That's the main thing that I think provides me with my sense of security, it's knowing that I have my little squatter support. I really think everybody should have that, everybody needs that. I think it's through work like what we're doing, that we're able to actually help strengthen your network, the people you actually rely on for security, and enable you to walk through the world with that sense of safety, with that sense of security, with that confidence and even pride. I think that's one thing that we're contributing to our city, to our region, and that's one thing that motivates me a lot.
I don't always know when, or how people are putting their skills to use, particularly the first aid skills. Sometimes we don't find out about it until years later. Somebody's like, "Yes, I came to your workshop, and then this happened, and I did this, this, and this." We're like, "What?" They're like, "Yes." We find out about it like that sometimes.
One person we're in touch with now who's interested in joining the organization, we found out about him on NPR. He went on NPR and said, "I went to this-- one of our workshops and ended up using his skills and was on the radio talking about it." It's like, "What?" That was really, really dope, but shoot, I prefer that people don't have to use those skills. If they use those skills all the time, that means they're always in a situation where it's dangerous.
The main skills or lessons from the workshops that we hope were deployed, relate to how we participate in our communities, and the role we take on, what we're prepared to do, and how that lifts us all up. That's more what it is.
Dame: It also feels like the kinship networks, the community relationships, the infrastructure and skills, that are empowering. Also feel like ways to prevent the conflicts. Like the more people that are engaged in this type of work, the more people that have these type of skills, the more people that understand the consequences, and are in community with folks that are prepared to respond.
I believe, for lack of a better word-- No, I'm not going to say trickle-down, I was going to make a joke, but I believe that that will pollinate the whole community in ways that may not feel direct. I've always felt like the work of UMedics, long term, is actually the most effective model I know of what will eventually prevent the conflicts that lead to gun violence. I don't know if you all feel that's a lot to claim, and that's like a lot of pressure to hold, but I see and receive that.
Thank you for the dedication, the commitment, the intentionality, the reverence of our legacies, and lineages, and histories, and that future-mindedness of how you've taken on this collective work and responsibility, and what you and Tree and y'all's families have built for so many communities and families directly, but also for our imagination. It really is an immeasurable service, and resource you have offered to us.
Martine: That means a lot, Damon. I know I sound calm saying that, but I just want you to feel how much it means to hear that. I agree. One thing that promotes the horizontal violence you see in the community is the lack of real safety and security, the lack of the safety net, the lack of the care net that we're trying to reconstruct through the work that we're doing in the organization. When they're feeling held with that, that creates conditions where conflicts aren't escalating to the point where people are dying, where people aren't fighting over resources, fighting for survival to the point where people are dying. I completely agree with that.
Kiss: That's beautiful. With that said, in order to get more people in it, they've got to know how to find you. How can folks find you, and the work of UMedics in the ways that you would like to be found?
Martine: Sure. One big way you can find UMedics is by a tweak on the word Ujimaa. If you go to your Kwanzaa Celebrations, it's going to be spelled U-J-I-M-A, but if you want to find us, you're going to spell it U-J-I-M-A-A, so two ways. That's how you find us, Ujimaa Medics, double the A and you find us specifically.
Dame: We charged up, maybe double-A.
Martine: Another good way to find us on social media is to use UMedics Chi, U-M-E-D-I-C-S C-H-I. That's how you find us on Facebook, that's how you find us on Instagram. You can always email us admin@umedics.org. Also, if you've been to a workshop and you've got some feedback, or you used a skill later, we would love to talk to you. Can you reach out to us? We want to talk to you.
Kiss: We're going to get a longtime medic, first-time caller type situation?
[laughter]
Kiss: Thank you so much for your time, your brilliance, your dedication, everything you do. It's been such a joy to learn from you today.
Martine: This has been just a really wonderful hour and a half. I really want to tell you all thank you for the work that you do. Thank you for the way that you do it. People do podcasts, but it's the way you do it. Thank you for doing it in the way that you do it, and putting the thought and care into your work. It shows. I love it and never change.
Dame: That means a lot. My 60-year-old self is thanking your 60-year-old self. We've got move with that ease.
Martine: We're going to meet under a tree. That's where we meet, under a tree. We're going to go under a tree, sit down. It's going to be nice.
[music]
Dame: Thank you again to Martine, and so much love to all the folks at UMedics, especially shout out co-founder Big Tree, part of our family. All right, it's time to do it. Let's hop into the peer review. You know what that means, it's time to invite back in our partner in Decriminalization. Eva, are you still with us?
Eva: Hey, hey. I still got my lab coat on.
[music]
Eva: Hoping I don't offend all my peers...
[laughter]
Dame: This was peak experiment metaphor. We really got deep in the data and the methodology. What were some of the things you took out?
Eva: That was such a rich conversation. I think one of the things I'm really sitting with is Martine talking about how UMedics' founders, how folks in the community needed to have seen something that showed us it was possible. That's the point of One Million Experiments. These things are possible. Martine did them. She came from a long legacy and lineage of people doing. We hope that seeing how it's done helps people create their own blueprints, their own legacies, their own actions.
She said something that I wrote down that I really liked that, why do we believe that we can do that? What that says to me is Martine isn't waiting for permission for anyone. It's we do it because we have to do it. We protect us because we need the skills to protect us. That's one of the questions we're always after. That's the question Martine was giving us some answers for, it's what motivates people to take collective action? This is one example of a motivation, and I hope that people can take that example and map it onto their own lives and their own experiences, and find that factor that's going to drive them to take that first step, to join up, to circle up, to get together, to get in the streets, to get shit done.
Kiss: I love that point, which we're always coming back to, of what moves people into action. That's a central question through this whole show. One of the things that she mentioned that we haven't gotten into is this idea of invitation, which I think for people getting started, there's often, I'll just speak in my own experience and in my own observation, this dilemma of, "Oh, no. Am I putting my energy into the right place? Is this where I should be? Is this what I should be doing? Who do I ask for that kind of feedback, accountability, relationship building, so that I know where I'm putting my energy is something that's useful and helpful?"
The idea of invitation, both on the part of the inviter and the invitee being something that people should be thoughtful about, and what kind of communication and relationship an invitation opens up, I thought that was really beautiful.
Dame: Yes, absolutely. Again, that's one of the central conceits of what we hope this show is. It's an invitation into not only these experiments that we're documenting but into this practice of experimenting. She gave us a lot of background, and I love the foundations and the traditions and the lineages that she named and pulled forward into what made this work possible.
One of the things that she said that was, I think, really profound is this notion of her and Big Tree having had data from showing up, and from practicing in other spaces that equipped them to then respond in this way. For me, as somebody who was a part of something created at 21, coming right out of school, and sometimes as a critique, it's very intertwined with my sense of self and identity, and something you don't want to let go, but we learned that we have to be able to plug in and exit. We have to be able to sunset things.
What I take from that is every practice or every experiment you participate in doesn't then have to be your lifelong work. Some of it is to gain the skills, gain the data to be able to respond 10 years down the lines when you are equipped, or when you did go and get that training, or you did go and get that nursing degree that you know how to use it because of the work that you did. I love that lineage.
Even going back to 911, but-
Kiss: And Katrina for both of us.
Dame: That's what I was going to emphasize, I want to reference. If you go in the AirGo archives, we talked to Keeanga Taylor, and for many of us we think of either Ferguson and Mike Brown, or Trayvon as the big bang of our current movement universe. Keeanga in a way that I'd never heard before, expanded that horizon back to Katrina, and I think Martine really exemplified the way in which Black Liberatory Movement was built out of responding and surviving that ecological disaster.
Eva: That really got me thinking about this push and pull between calls for action and big spaces. I think Stop Cop City, as we sit here right now, weighs heavily on my mind, and I see it's in touch with so many organizers across the United States and has been a part of the before, the middle, and the after when the scene explodes, when the nation takes a look at a certain spot and the pressure on the spotlight is on and opportunities are developing.
I sit with that too, and I'm thinking about the places and people in my life that have led me to where I am, and how I showed up and what I took, and what I gave. I really thought about that when Martine was talking about the Zapatistas because I spent quite a bit of time with them-
Dame: You're so cool.
Eva: - in my college years.
Dame: Every episode, every bit, we're just learning something new about you. That's so cool. [laughs]
Kiss: In the mid-90s I went to the moon. It was pretty nice, and then I came back.
[laughter]
Eva: It was radical, and it was great. I also didn't come back and create UMedics. I need to sit back and think about what that experience gave me, and what I gave back because of that experience. Because it's really inspirational to hear about how Martine has pushed that forward in a collective way, has taken individual experience and skills, and pushed that forward, so that other people can get trained up in those skills. I love that and I want to push forward too. I'm sitting right here feeling like I need to fly to Chicago and get some skills with Martine because she's doing it right.
Kiss: I had the same thought. I was like, "Oh, damn, I really got to learn how to do these things." Everyone should know how to do these things.
Dame: Yes, and definitely the basic day-to-day survival skills that we all can expand within people, and the fact that that's not even a part of our education framework as a given of how do we respond to the emergency?
Kiss: Like you're a boy scout, basically.
Dame: Yes, one that's just a skill that is accessible and transferable, and highly needed. Also, the fact that in her story she revealed that it's not just getting the basic one-on-one, she herself dedicated the dialectic of going and engaging the institutions that maybe are not designed for liberation, but do offer information that our community doesn't often have access to. Like going into the institution and liberating some of those knowledges and some of those practices.
Most people just be like, "Oh, I'm going to do my mutual aid version of the thing, which we want people to do," But just taking out the unique value in Martine's experience of being able to dedicate herself in a more structured way to increase the capacity of the organization.
Kiss: One person going through that training led to thousands of people getting a level of training that they wouldn't have had otherwise.
Dame: I really appreciated the point that we ended at, and I want to acknowledge their work on asthma and also just want to honor Let Us Breathe Collective lost someone to asthma. I just want to honor the legacy of Ms. Aaron Cooper, epilepsy and seizures. My grandmother my whole life had seizures, so I know the seriousness of that, but so much of their work is centered around gun violence, and where we were able to get. That real hypothesis at the end was so important I think for the abolitionist movement because that's the question that especially in a space like Chicago, where there's the reality and then also the propaganda, and imagination of gun violence, that really is a barrier and obstacle for people imagining new ways of living and new freedoms beyond policing.
Usually, the things we rely on are more laws, more incarceration, or some type of lobbying against the production of weapons and guns, which could also potentially be valuable work, or these indirect things of we build the relationship, we create political power, we create education, we offer food, we offer housing, which obviously, will address conflict. But the learning here of, preparing ourselves to respond to it will not only save the lives of people who are directly impacted, that is the seed of how we actually intervene and address gun violence.
We have these very masculine patriarchal notions of street interruption that also has its value, and I don't want to completely diminish, but just this approach of a healthcare responsive skill building towards the reality of a harm is actually how we're going to stop gun violence. I don't think anyone else is really articulating that as a path forward or solution as clearly as what UMedics work embodies. Thank you again, Martine and everybody at UMedics for all those learnings.
One, if folks want to learn some more about some of the things we discussed, particularly the effort around the trauma center or more stories about UMedics, you can go in the AirGo archives. You can check out Episode 25 with V formally from Fly. Also, Tweak G is Episode 45, and co-founder Amika Big Tree is Episode 78.
Kiss: We also invite you, see what I did there, to check out all of the other episodes of One Million Experiments, both of them are first and second season. Check out the amazing One Million Experiments website at millionexperiments.com. There's all kinds of cool stuff going on over there. Eva, where else would you like to invite people to plug in?
Eva: I'd love for you to stop on by the Gram and check out millionexperiments on IG. You can also find Interrupting Criminalization at interruptingcriminalization.com or @interruptcrim on all the socials.
Kiss: We're at AirGo Radio. You can find our other pod AirgGo@AirGo or wherever you get your podcasts, and we'll be back next month with another experiment in building safety toward a world without police and prisons.
Dame: Much love to the people.
Kiss: Peace.