After Rosen was shot in the arm at Wounded Knee, both the Lakota Sioux and AIM adopted him as one of their own. "He risked his life on a daily basis for seventy days at Wounded Knee to protect the Lakotas and see their dignity and pride acknowledged," says Glenn Morris, a member of the Colorado American Indian Movement's leadership council. "In the indigenous nation, talk is cheap, but what's important is how you live your life. The greatest contribution someone can make to a community is a willingness to risk your life for the survival of the community. People don't forget that."
But once back in New York, Rosen continued to struggle with what he'd seen at Wounded Knee. Unsettled, he decided to move west, to Denver, where he formed a collective called Colorado Street Medics. Rosen's goal was simple, if also ambitious: "Traditionally in every tribal society, medicine sprang from and was the property of the tribe and the people as a whole," he wrote in a notebook. Through his work, he hoped to "return medicine to the hands of the people from which it sprang."
Ron Rosen earned the nickname "Doc" as a know-it-all child.
Details
Related Content
More About
He set up an acupuncture practice — he became the first registered acupuncturist in Colorado, No. 001 — and continued to work as a street medic over the next three decades, even as other collectives disbanded. In 1999, he took sixteen medics to the World Trade Organization Ministerial — better known as the Battle of Seattle — where Colorado Street Medics worked with the Direct Action Network. Their efforts helped resuscitate the street-medic tradition around the country, merging Rosen's stricter structure with the Washington group's more haphazard politics. "There was a sort of wedding of these two mentalities, which gives us that history," says Grace Keller, a longtime medic who works with Stepping Stones to Community Health in Chicago and created the Medics Wiki page that continues to document the movement. "The Colorado Street Medics are a really interesting group, because it's the first modern street-medic collective, in many ways. It's hard to talk about street-medic history without name-dropping it every few minutes."
Today, five years after Rosen's death, Colorado Street Medics remains legendary...and active.
Street medics from this state have traveled to Washington, Scotland, Africa, England, New York, Kansas, Oregon, California, the Netherlands and many other spots around the globe to provide street-style education in first aid, herbalism, Chinese medicine and disaster relief. They've helped out after natural disasters — sent money to Haiti, traveled to Louisiana in the wake of Katrina — and unnatural horrors, including the aftermath of the World Trade Center bombings. And they've mended bodies at political actions in Seattle in 1999, Quebec City in 2001, and outside just about every Republican National Convention and Democratic National Convention over the past forty years.
Although propelled by their own beliefs, they function as a rogue band of good Samaritans. The single most important organizing principle of any street-medic collective is "Do no harm." In Colorado, that's bolstered by another motto: "We give solidarity, not charity."
******
As she prepares for the latest Occupy Denver action in six months, Zoe Williams's politics give her pause. Protesters have attached an American flag and two handmade peace signs to sticks that they hold above the crowd. "There is no way I'm marching underneath that," she says. The only symbol she's comfortable with is the one displayed on her body in at least five places: The Star of Life, sometimes called the Star of Rescue, the international sign of the street medic, marks her hips, back and shoulders.
Williams is one of several medics who are also members of Denver Anarchist Black Cross, a collective that firmly supports the work of Colorado Street Medics, and the obvious patriotism in the symbols before her ignites her ire. Tuesday through Saturday, she manages the P&L Press Infoshop next door, where she sells books on radical politics and lets rowdy kids hide from the cops while reading free zines.
But today she is Zoe the medic (which happens to be her Gmail name), not Zoe the radical. To prepare for protests, the petite Williams stuffs twenty pounds of equipment into three hip bags, one backpack and the pockets of her black EMS pants without appearing noticeably larger. Bags full of glucose tablets, white flower oil and its herb partners, gauze, bubbles, Sharpies, Band-Aids, a poncho, a heat blanket, water bottles and backup materials are held together by her boyfriend's drastically oversized camo belt. (She refers to him as her "partner" and refers to herself as "female-bodied" rather than "female"; labels do not factor positively into her world.) While many street medics prefer a fishing vest, she has yet to find one small enough to fit and still be practical. (Children's fishing vests are not great for storing hemostats.) She owns multiple pairs of black, rhinestone-bedazzled and slightly cat-eyed glasses, and she saves the crappiest one for protests; the possibility of pepper spray strongly discourages contacts. Her hair is platinum, almost white, and artfully shaped into a flared pixie cut. From the neck up, she looks like Tinkerbell. From the neck down, she's all business.
