Interview transcript: “Understanding and Transforming the Medical Industrial Complex”: Adar Higgs interviewing Mordecai Cohen Ettinger and Jen Deerinwater for JustUs**
listen to the audio recording of this interview
Image description: graphic with a light pink background. Black text at top reads, “HJC’s Spring Pol Ed Series Starts March 2nd!” In the center of the graphic is a piece of art by Micah Bazant - it is a black and white drawing of two disabled people of color, sitting closely together, surrounded by large flowers, a butterfly and a hummingbird. One person uses a wheelchair and a ventilator, and has a drink with a plastic straw on her tray. One person is fat and uses a cane. They are smiling and radiating love. The drawing has been colored in by Brunem using pencils; bright yellow and orange flowers, blue sky, an amber monarch butterfly, the people are wearing green and pink lip colors respectively. Black text below the art reads, “Understanding & Transforming the Medical Industrial Complex, Part 2: Climate Justice Edition. More info and to enroll: tinyurl.com/HJCSpring23Enroll. The Health Justice Commons logo in red and black is in the bottom right corner of the graphic.
Show intro: [a portion of ‘Water Get No Enemy’ by Fela Kuti plays in the background]
Good morning you are listening to KDUR 91.9 and 93.9FM, also streaming online at KDUR.org. I’m your sweet and relentless, bothered and curious, semi-transient, multi-passionate radio host Adar, bringing you “JustUs”, a show about public health, mutual aid, and community based solutions. This is a show that features intimate conversations about complex issues. I’m bringing you place-based conversations recorded throughout the rural Southwest, broadcasting on stolen lands in so-called Durango, CO.
Adar: This morning I am speaking with Jen Deerinwater and Mordecai Cohen Ettinger about a course that Health Justice Commons is hosting focused on disability justice and also climate activism. Good morning, thank you so much for coming on the show, Mordecai and also Jen, I could not be more excited to talk to you about Health Justice Commons and the upcoming training that you all are putting on, well it’s a course Understanding and Transforming the Medical Industrial Complex, Part 2: Climate Justice Edition. I would love for you both to take time to introduce yourselves more fully, and then we can get more into this course, what it’s about, and who it’s for.
Jen: O'-Si-Yo', Hello, this is Jen Deerinwater. I am a bisexual, Two Spirit, multiply-disabled citizen of the Cherokee Nation of Oklahoma. I am a freelance journalist, I am a contributor at Truth Out, and I am the Founding Director of Crushing Colonialism, which is an Indigenous media nonprofit.
Mordecai: Hi, this is Mordecai Cohen Ettinger. I am the Founding Director of Health Justice Commons, and I’m also the Director of Development of Sins Invalid. I am here today with Jen, and you Adar, to share about Health Justice Commons’ Spring Political Education Series “Understanding and Transforming the Medical Industrial Complex, Part 2: Climate Justice Edition”, which focuses on the intersections between climate justice, environmental racism, and healthcare systems as they exist today. We’re excited and we hope that folx will be excited too, and join us. It begins on March 2nd, and we have rolling enrollment so even if you miss the first week or two we’d still love to have you. Would you like us to share a little bit about what the series covers, Adar?
Adar: Sure, go ahead.
Mordecai: Well, the series covers the foundational history of the medical industrial complex (MIC) and its roots in white supremacy, eugenics, ableism, essentially all of its ties to interlocking oppressions that support late capitalism; and how those interlocking oppressions are perpetuated within the MIC and really amplified. Also, we look at the complicity of the MIC with corporate polluters and big pharma, and how in many ways, the MIC that is healthcare systems as we know them today are not only complicit with corporate pollution, but also are really profiting from the injustices that climate injustice and environmental racism cause. So we’re looking at these deep connections, and we try to expose them to basically allow people to have the knowledge to take action, and also to really empower us to validate the wisdom of our lived experience, which is incredibly important and powerful and transformative as well.
The series brings together folks from all over turtle island, the U.S., and some folks internationally as well. We usually have over 100 people participating, and we have members of the disability community, disability justice activists and organizers and then we have activists and organizers from many different movement building and social justice sectors, ranging from reproductive justice, to climate justice. We also have some artists and healing artists and healthcare workers from inside the MIC who are aiming to be agents of change from within the system, especially a lot of med and nursing students. We have midwives, we have doulas, we have herbalists. Everyone is welcome to join, but those are some of the key communities who are often represented. Jen has been a guest presenter and is also one of our co-facilitators of this series, and has been a participant as well, which is such an honor because Jen’s work is so transformative and Jen’s role as a leader in Indigenous rights and climate and disability justice is so powerful and important. Jen I would love for you to share anything that you think that I left out.
Jen: Oh goodness. I think you covered it all. I’ll just add that like you said, I’ve been involved in the past. This is my third year having some kind of role in this class. I took it first as a participant and I loved it. I actually found out once I enrolled that some of my work was on the course syllabus, which was very…I just felt very honored and very humbled by that. And then last year I got to close out the series with the last class as a speaker, and then this year I get to co-facilitate with a focus on environment and climate specifically with Mordecai, which I’m so excited to do.
Adar: I haven’t gotten to take the course yet, but I’m pretty sure that I’ll be in this course coming up March 2nd. As an immunocompromised person living in a rural, mountain town kind of area surrounded by Native lands throughout the pandemic, knowing about the work of Sins Invalid is one of those lifeline things for me throughout the pandemic that helped me get through. Usually I interview people who are regional in the Four Corners area, but you both have perspectives that are so rich that I need to import you in and get your voice out here on the airwaves. So when it comes to this issue of medical racism, climate justice, and the healthcare industrial complex, Mordecai, how did you get involved in this topic, and then Jen, I’d love to hear that from you as well.
Mordecai: Thank you. And I just wanted to share for your listeners that in addition to Health Justice Commons, the organization I work with that you just referenced is Sins Invalid. Just to make sure that you and the listeners know you to–
Adar: Thank you (nervously laughing)
Mordecai: No problem. Just to make sure that everyone understands how to pronounce the name. It’s a little bit of a pun, actually kind of calling out the way that invalid has been used against disabled communities in order to stigmatize us. So that’s why it’s pronounced invalid. [The name] says that the sins and stigma that have been cast against disabled people is actually invalid, inaccurate, and needs to be contested and exposed and transformed. So, in regards to how I got involved in this work to disrupt and transform the MIC, I think I flowed into this work through many different streams of my own personal lived experience and survivorship, and also the cross-sector organizing that I’ve done in my life. I’ve been doing organizing for almost 30 years now since I was a teenager, and I’ve done a lot of different work, ranging from disability justice work, learning from the black indigenous and additional people of color leadership of Sins Invalid and now I’m a part of that organization. I was actually part of it as a supporter since it started, so that’s been a big part of my work, but also anti-poverty organizing, economic justice, racial justice, Palestine solidarity, queer and trans liberation, and abolition work. I’ve really done quite a bit of activism and organizing since I was a young adult. So really looking at some of the ways of the oppression and violence of the MIC has really loomed over and harmed our communities really brought to my awareness that the MIC exists as a system of interlocking oppressive institutions not dissimilar from the prison industrial complex, and in fact, they’re overlapping and they’re both very carceral. They’re both oriented to control, and confinement, and surveillance, and really compliance. The flood tides of violence are, the same flood tides of violence flow between and within the two of them. But we didn’t really have formations in our communities to really challenge, disrupt, and transform the MIC, like we do now for the prison industrial complex, like we do now. We have a pretty robust and well-formed abolition movement. So, that’s a big part of the reason I founded Health Justice Commons with the support of our founding vision council. You can find out who other folx are that are involved on our website healthjusticecommons.org. Then also I’m a survivor of medical torture and radiation poisoning myself, along with being disabled, having acquired disabilities because of the environmental toxicity and poisoning and medical abuse that I experienced. And also because of the types of disabilities that I was born with like asthma and scoliosis. So this has been my fight to be in solidarity with my beloved community members, and my own fight too. Yeah, that’s how I got into it.
Adar: Thank you for sharing.
Jen: This is Jen speaking. It’s such a long…I feel like it’s such a long and complex answer of how I got to this place and this work, but really I think the simplest way to put it is it’s just a mix of my personal and professional experiences. You know it’s growing up, I’m a citizen of the Cherokee Nation of Oklahoma, and I spent my childhood, up until when I was 18 and moved away for college, living between rural areas of my nation’s reservation in Northeastern Oklahoma and in West Texas in Abilene. So it’s just sort of based on my own experiences of seeing who got care, who didn’t get care, what was happening with the local environment, the way that I was being treated as a chronically-ill Native child growing up and then the experiences I’ve had as an adult. I am also a survivor of medical abuse.
I almost feel like I have more experiences of some form of discrimination, oppression, and abuse in the medical system than I do good ones. You know, whether it’s some anti-Native issues that I have experienced in multiple healthcare facilities, or whether it’s ableism, fatphobia, anti-queerness, misogyny, you know. It’s also just what I’ve seen with other friends of mine, the experiences they’ve had as Black or brown people, or as immigrants, migrants, you know, just hearing all of these experiences. Just hearing all of these experiences of the ways in which the MIC ends up denying us our humanity, denies us care, and actually in fact ends up creating and worsening health issues and disabilities–and, some of this absolutely ties into the environment and the climate chaos that we’re experiencing right now. You know, Indigenous people, Black and brown people, disabled people, all on the front lines of climate chaos, and all communities of Indigenous or Black and brown people tend to have higher rates of disabilities than do white people. So I tend to look at this as a double, like it’s being doubly-compounded with oppression.
And the longer that I’ve done the work I do, I’ve been doing organizing work in some fashion for over 20 years now, and I’ve been in various movement spaces, and some of those spaces were more liberal or progressive. I also did a lot of work with democratic candidates in the party when I was younger, and I just got so fed up with everything that I saw within the system. It was so clear that the liberals and the democrats were not only not only going to come in and save us, but they were actually making things worse. Either through their silence and complicity, or through their outright actions of wanting to drill and do other horrific environmental catastrophic projects and such. But as I also have done work as a journalist, like my own research, the more you learn, the more you realize how interconnected all of these issues are. Like Mordecai said about the prison industrial complex and the MIC.
So many of these issues tie together, and so many people on the left–and I’m not just talking about progressives and liberals now, I’m talking about the radical left, like the true radical left–a lot of them are incredibly ableist. It’s been so blatantly clear through Covid that they don’t care about my life any more than the other side cares about my life. So this work to bring down the medical industrial complex, to bring forward disability justice, and to do all this work in combination with other movements and other communities is crucial. Because whether you’re a native person like me doing work around disability justice, or you’re a native person trying to stop uranium mining on your rez, either way, we’re still in a similar fight, and we have to be there for each other. And that’s a very long winded answer of what brought me here. I know I said that I was going to keep it simple and short and I did not.
Adar: I mean, I’m just ready to ask KDUR to give us a 24-hour telethon for this. There’s a lot to say.
Jen: [Laughing]
Adar: So speaking of radicals not understanding disability justice or being outright ableist, I mentioned before we hit record that I’m living in an area where on the one hand, there are Native lands all around, and there are some devastating impacts of covid that people have faced on native lands, not due to lack of protocols and precautions, but because of other disparities, and then on the other hand, there’s a lot of folks who are usually white, socio-economically privileged, and people that are involved in things like veganism, herbalism, acupuncture, that are unvaccinated, unmasked, and, so when you encounter people like this, who are democratic or liberal or on the more radical side, what are some of the first things that you say to bring them around? Or is it that. That’s why this course. We need this course. Are there a few bullet points that you can start to try to bring someone’s perspective around?
Jen: This is Jen, so I’m going to give my answer as an Indigenous person and then I would love to hear what mordecai has to say. I’ll start by saying that people like this I’m not necessarily trying to change their minds because to me they’re already so engaged in white supremacist and colonizing behaviors that it’s just not worth it for my own wellbeing to try to engage with them and try to change their minds. I’m not going to do it. I’m not going to waste my valuable and finite energy and time with people like that.
However, what I do have to say about these kinds of people is that they are ableist, along with racist. I believe in using natural and holistic remedies and cures, but most of these forms of holistic healthcare that these kinds of people you’re discussing use, they’re not their traditional medicines. They’re the medicines of other people. Tumeric for example, great. I use it for inflammation. That comes from Southeast Asia. That’s not a European traditional medicine. You know: elderberry. I take it every day. That’s an Indigenous medicine to these lands. So one, all of these people, the things that they’re practicing–yoga, acupuncture, they’ve all culturally-appropriated those practices from other people. From BIPOC people! [so that’s] first of all. But second, when you have a healthy immune system and you have absolutely no legitimate reason to not get a vaccination, you’re putting people at risk. You’re putting lives like mine and my loved ones at risk. I am on immunosuppressants. I can’t take all vaccinations. Some of them could literally kill me. But somebody else who isn’t on immuno-suppressants, who has a healthy immune system and no health problems, by taking that vaccination you’re not only protecting yourself and everyone around you, you’re protecting lives like mine. And when you tell me that you won’t get that shot, that tells me that you don’t care if I live or die.
The other issue with this, the anti-vaxxer movement… (t’s not entirely white people, but it’s heavily funded by white people)... you know the other issue is that American Indian and Alaskan Native communities were the hardest hit in the so called US of any other racial or ethnic group. We also, per capita, had the highest rates of vaccinations of any race or ethnicity in this country. We had some of the strongest Covid safety and public health protections on our lands, but at every turn there were white people trying to come on our lands. Whether it was them trying to buy gas or buy goods on our lands, or it was them trying to bring christianity to the lands… (there was a massive covid outbreak that’s been linked to some church activities that were on the Navajo Nation)….you know one of the other areas of issues we’ve had was with white politicians trying to come in and tell our tribes what they can and can’t do to keep our people and and our lands safe. The Tribes of South Dakota experienced that with Governor Kristi Noem. They didn’t ban people from coming through their lands, but they did Covid contact tracing. And Kristi Noem and then later President Trump tried to shut that down. So even on sovereign lands, white people are coming in and keeping us from being able to take care of our wellbeing.
So when I hear that these anti-vaxxer types want to use, they want to appropriate, they want to steal BIPOC medicines, and then still turn around and give us their illnesses, because they don’t want to get vaccinated, all while doing that while coming onto our lands when we’re telling them that we don’t want them there or that there’s certain things that they need to practice while wearing a mask, that for me is just, well, you’re just a white supremacist, and I am not going to change your mind. All I can do is try to change the systems around us. Now, I would love to hear what Mordecai has to say on this.
Mordecai: This is Mordecai speaking. I don’t know that I have very much to add Jen, I think that you spoke powerfully addressing all of the key things. I guess I would just amplify the extent to which there is such a normalization of ableist mindsets and eugenicists thinking and policies in the so-called U.S., that that makes a whole anti-vax movement possible, where people can just say that “well, I’m just going to take care of myself through like herbs,” that are, exactly as Jen articulated, culturally appropriated by most people. To think: “Well, l I’m going to protect myself so that’s sufficient,” as opposed to understanding that it is eugenicist in nature to say that as an expression of personal freedom you are going to reject something that could benefit the collective, and that that be a legitimate decision to make, or even a legitimate way to think about things. It’s very, very painful. And the amount of, for black and indigenous and Latinx and additional people of color who are disabled, chronically sick or chronically-ill who are facing simultaneous ableism and white supremacy as a consequence of these movements, and people who are behaving this way, which has been massive, that the U.S. vaccination rates are really low compared to other countries, and that’s in the context of global vaccine apartheid even.
So it’s just, it’s really infuriating, and it’s been life-threatening for people. And it sounds like all of us,because of the nature of our disabilities have experienced, and in the communities that we love and people we love have just experienced the concrete impacts of these movements and this type of thinking, are experiencing so much more confinement and isolation than otherwise would be necessary. So our freedom and our autonomy doesn’t matter at all because this type of thinking renders disabled people as disposable, and everyone else to have some sort of right to freedom that for some reason we don’t deserve because of essentially us being disabled. And those are the other types of mindsets that are really important to expose in this type of context. Jen really spoke to that also. I’m really echoing what Jen just shared.
Jen: There’s also something else I wanted to throw in. So while I’m clearly very pro-vaccination, native people like I said we’ve had the highest rates of covid vaccinations per capita of any other racial or ethnic group, but our life expectancy between 2019 and 2021 dropped 6.6 years because covid killed so many of our people. That’s the other issue. When people don’t vaccinate who can get vaccinated, they’re putting other people who don’t have healthcare resources, who may not have clean running water, who are already suffering from genocide, they’re just furthering that genocide, they’re just fueling it. And that’s also part of the medical industrial complex. You know I feel like in a capitalist colonialist system the system is going to eat us up and make money off us in any way that it can. For some people that’s using them as labor, and then for others, some of us like me, who are chronically ill our entire lives, it is using us as patients. The system is just using us up and spitting us out and it doesn’t care who lives or dies. But something that has also been frustrating to me that I think is really important about what Mordecai said about the ableist mindset, is that really once everyone really once many people had access to the vaccine I noticed that at a lot of native community events people stopped masking, and that’s been very upsetting and very disappointing. i’ve seen disability leaders in this country going to events indoors and not masking. So I really feel like as an immunocompromised person in this country I have just been left behind to die. But I have made it this far despite being on immunosuppressants without getting covid. So clearly, I know something and I’m doing something right. If those out there who are able bodied and have healthy immune systems would just listen to people like me no one would have to be living in the extremes, no one would have to be living in the extremes like Mordecai and I and others are having to live in, going without healthcare, or without employment, or groceries, or whatever. If people would just think beyond their own selfish selves, and their own needs and wants, things would not have to have been this dire. And they would not still be this dire. Because despite what our government might be saying, covid is not over, people are still getting sick, people are still going without care. It’s just that it’s people like me and other oppressed and other multiply marginalized people that our society just doesn’t care about.
Adar: And I have an autoimmune condition, I don’t know what is the reasons you take immunosuppressants…Mordecai you mentioned asthma…so many of the illnesses that people are suffering [from] that can cause disability are environmental in their sources. Environmental pollution. Yeah, which just gets into the importance of this climate focused training. Thank you so much for coming on the show. I would love to have you back again soon.
Mordecai: We would love to explore that, and before we sign off we just wanted to let the listeners know once again we would love for you to join us at health justice commons understanding and transforming the medical industrial complex climate justice edition. It starts March 2nd, but we practice crip time, we call it, so even if you are a little late enrolling, we’d still love for you to join us. We also have guest speakers from Shelterwood Collective on Pomo Land It’s a beautiful Indigenous and Black-led land rematriation project, so there’s a lot of solutions to the oppression of the medical industrial complex that we introduce to our communities, and if you want to have more conversations like the one that we had here, and incubate transformative solutions for our future, please join us, we’d love to have you.
Show outro: You have been listening to “JustUs” on KDUR 91.9 and 93.9 FM, also streaming online at KDUR.org a show about mutual aid, public health, and community based solutions, broadcasting from so-called Durango, CO, and recorded throughout on the ancestral lands of the Nuuichu, Diné, Apache, Tiwa, and also the other original pueblo people whose homelands are located in current day New Mexico.
[a portion of ‘Water Get No Enemy’ by Fela Kuti plays in the background]
JustUs is a show about public health, mutual aid, and community-based solutions in the rural Southwest, which airs on KDUR Fort Lewis College Community Radio in so-called Durango, Colorado and will soon be broadcasted on KNCE True Taos Radio in Taos, New Mexico. Both are free-form, volunteer run, community radio stations. The show is also released digitally in podcast form. JustUs is recorded, edited, and produced by Adar, a neuroqueer, Jewish, disabled white femme whose work and life in the Four Corners dates back 15 years, and currently involves (in addition to producing this show!) somatic counseling for grief and chronic illness, teaching as an adjunct professor in the public health department of Fort Lewis College, and supporting the development of KSUT Tribal Radio’s first ever Tribal Water Media Fellowship.
**A note from Adar: I have never produced a transcript for JustUs before. Recording this interview on Health Justice Commons’ series has been the perfect opportunity for me to do so for the first time. If folx are have benefitted from having access to this transcript, My resources and time are limited, but I would love to hear from you! I would love to get a sense of who is listening, and how you are accessing my content, so that I can continue to direct efforts to making the show accessible to those of you who want more content like this!