Joan Hawkinson Bohorfoush

Friends and family honor Joan Hawkinson Bohorfoush, and pay tribute to her life and her work. Joanie was a social studies teacher, radio producer, cultural anthropologist, feminist, and social justice activist in Portland, Oregon. She died of ovarian cancer in 1997. She was witty, fun to be with, and extraordinarily insightful. She was also a dear friend and sister in the struggle to build a better world.

Born in Seattle, Washington in 1951, she was a third-generation Norwegian-American who grew up in a tight-knit extended family, many of whom were evangelical Christians. She was a younger sibling in a family of five children, expected by their parents to contribute to society and to have a vision of their lives that extended beyond their own immediate horizons. Joanie’s interests always tended toward the cultural and she worked to find common ground among people and amidst differences. As a college student, Joanie worked summers in the fish canneries in Alaska, where she also began to study Inuit traditions. She earned her master’s degree in Cultural Anthropology from the University of Massachusetts in 1980. In 1985, she married Joe Bohorfoush and settled in Portland, where her sister Jan also lived. Joanie taught women’s history classes through Women’s Studies at Portland State University and United States history and global studies at West Linn High School. She co-produced two award-winning documentaries: American Apsara: Portraits of Cambodian American Women and Scarves of Many Colors: Muslim Women and the Veil.

Joanie’s personal struggle to bridge the cultural world of her childhood and her later, more secular experiences, as a social activist and anthropologist profoundly shaped her work. For her master’s thesis, Joanie produced a slide show on the history of American family life in which she analyzed the images and roles of men and women against a backdrop of world events such as the Industrial Revolution and World War II. This idea of understanding people’s lives in the context of the world around them shaped Joanie’s later work with oral history interviews for radio documentaries. The experiences of the Cambodian refugees and the Killing Fields told the larger story of the war in Southeast Asia and its aftermath. The contrasting experiences of Muslim women in Algeria who were forced by French colonizers to remove their veils versus Iranian women who were forced by the Islamic state to cover themselves underscored the significance of the social context in terms of understanding people’s lives. The stories that Joanie wove together into a radio documentary also told about ordinary people seeking to hold onto their traditions while meeting the challenges of a new, and sometimes hostile, country.

Guiding Joanie’s various projects was a profound respect for other cultures and a tremendous capacity to connect with people with a wide range of backgrounds. Her interviewing skills, for which she was well-known, grew out of this openness and curiosity. While she often immersed herself in books and articles to gain background in her subject matter, Joanie was primarily an oral historian. She worked and learned through relationships, which required a keen attentiveness to the social fabric of everyday life. For example, Joanie was known for her little gifts—candy, a potted plant, a funny card—that were bestowed on all sorts of occasions, including her many visits in the process of arranging an interview. Indeed, she saw the interview itself as a tremendous gift—one that required attentiveness to preserving the integrity of that individual’s story. She was able to draw out the stories that defined both an individual’s life and a particular era, searching out the connecting places between personal lives and transformative historical events.

Joanie was not just an exemplary interviewer, she was also a radio activist. She loved the accessibility of radio, and she used it skillfully to give voice to points of view and people who otherwise would not be heard. She produced pieces featuring demonstrators against the United States bombing of Iraq during and after the Persian Gulf War, a memorial to Ben Linder, the Abraham Lincoln International Brigade, and scores of people from all walks of life who were resisting injustice in some way. Joanie put considerable effort into producing each program, including conducting the interviews, selecting appropriate music, writing and recording an introduction and conclusion, editing a finished piece, and delivering it to KBOO, Portland’s community radio station, to be aired on the Old Mole Variety Hour, a weekly left perspective radio show. Joanie collaborated on producing as many as four programs per month before she became ill, and then one or two programs per month after she got sick.

Despite her optimistic spirit, things did not always go well for Joanie. She became a teacher because she wanted to make a difference in the world, but her first teaching job was at a conservative, affluent suburban high school. She soon found herself at odds with the administration over her teaching style and content. After three difficult years, Joanie was fired from the school. She appealed the decision to the school board, but despite moving testimony from students, colleagues, and university teacher-educators at a public hearing, board members voted in favor of the school administration. Two weeks later, Joanie learned that she had ovarian cancer.

As a tribute, friends and colleagues produced a curriculum book, published in 2000, to carry on the work of Joan Bohorfoush. Scarves of Many Colors, a Curriculum Guide accompanies distribution of her award-winning radio documentary of the same name.