Carol Malina Kaulukukui, was born and raised in Kuliʻouʻou Valley on the island of Oʻahu. Malina attained her Master’s of Social Work (MSW) at Portland State University. During her time on the continental U.S., Malina worked at a day treatment center for people suffering from serious mental illness. At the day treatment center, Malina wrote and successfully received $1 million dollars from the Department of Housing and Urban Development to expand access to mental health services. Returning to Hawaiʻi, Malina served in the administrative arm of the Department of Health Adult Mental Health Division. After retirement, she began teaching hula as a healing activity for women experiencing substance abuse in prison. During the pandemic, Malina has been actively involved in the community as a Kumu Hula and Hoʻoponopono practitioner.
Interview Details
- Narrator: Carol Malina Kaulukukui (CK)
- Interviewer: Stephen Pono Hicks (PH)
- Recording Date: 08/07/2021
- Format: Zoom video
- Location: Honolulu, Hawaiʻi
- Key Words: Kuliʻouʻou, hoʻoponopono
Interview Transcript
PH: Thank you for joining me today, Malina. We’re doing an oral history interview with you over Zoom, and today is August 17, 2021. Just to get things started, can you please state your full name?
CK: My full name is Carol Malina Kaulukukui.
PH: OK, thank you. And where were you born, Malina?
CK: I was born in Honolulu, Oʻahu.
PH: OK, can you describe the general neighborhood and environment that you grew up in?
CK: I grew up in Kuliʻouʻou Valley, which was and still is a working class neighborhood. It was way out in the boonies when we moved out there. It’s just before Hawaiʻi Kai when you’re coming from town, but Hawaiʻi Kai was not there. What was there were the pig farmers. And I remember the pig farmers coming by a couple of times a week. We would put out a five gallon can of our what would now be compostable foods, and they would come by and gather it, and we would call them the Slop Men, which was pretty undignified at the time. But the Slop Men would come by a couple of times a week to collect food for their pigs. Up the road about two blocks was a dairy farm, and after school, we would go in and watch the cows being milked. And every once in a while we were lucky enough to see calves being born. I mean, that was the biggie at the time. There was a tiny little store there that we all went to buy popsicles and candy and soda that our parents forbade us to eat. But we would go there and buy them at this little store. And the woman who ran the store was a friend of the the dairy owners, and her name was Eleanor, and she was just the nicest person to all of the kids. I mean, you know, when you think about resilient neighborhoods and when you think about resilient families and resilient kids, there are always people in the neighborhood who just looked out for you. And it was Eleanor. I can still see her face today. And if we didn’t have enough, she would look in her pocket and put a nickel in the till. You know, that kind of a person.
PH: Well, thank you for sharing those recollections. Can you describe a little bit of your genealogy and then maybe also some of the aspects of Hawaiian culture that you grew up with?
CK: I am the first born of Thomas Kaulukukui from Hilo and Honolulu and Felice Wong from Honolulu, whose ancestors came from Guangdong province. Please remember that I was born in the 40s and there was no Hawaiian attention to Hawaiian heritage. We were all on our way to being American citizens and Americans. There was nothing about being Hawaiian until the renaissance of the 1970s. In fact, there was a big push to assimilate. So my first name is Carol because for 100 years there was a state law that said all children born in wedlock needed to have Christian or English first names. So when I look back, you know, all of my friends had English names. And of course, back then coming from Kuliʻouʻou, everybody was brown. They were people of color and 100% of us had English names. And I look back and I think, wow, that was really a powerful assimilation strategy, if you will. Although at the time the law was made, it was really because Hawaiians often had only one name traditionally, historically. And in order to make things even or the same, the Department of Health needed to have kids and people with first names and last names. So that’s how the law came about. But it was a powerful assimilation strategy when I look back on it from a social work perspective.
PH: During that assimilation period, was that sort of when you learned about the cultural practices that you are now teaching, like hula and hoʻoponopono? Or when did you become more aware of those practices, especially with early on those being kind of suppressed in your lifetime?
CK: Well, fortunately, my Chinese mother put me in a hula class, and I don’t know whether it was because I said as a kid I wanted to dance hula, or she thought it was a good idea. But in elementary school, I was taking hula. And while I enjoyed that, it didn’t really get into my soul until I was older. But I did dance hula, and I enjoyed it. Ho’oponopono I never heard of until I was an adult because we were all on our way to be Americanized. You know, I never learned about the overthrow. They never taught it to us in school. You know, this is back in the old days. So when you look at pre-Hawaiian renaissance, there was a huge absence of any kind of Hawaiian culture.
PH: So then, was it somewhat unusual that you, being a young girl, would be learning hula during that time, even with your Hawaiian background? Or would it maybe have been frowned upon?
CK: I don’t know. I just know that I had a haole teacher, and it was amazing because she was haole, but she was so entrenched in the culture. And us haumana used to think that she was Pele because her gray hair was long, and it kind of looked wild, and she was very strict. I never saw her in anything else except mu’umu’us, which was kind of unusual in those days. She sang her own songs. I always saw her with an ukulele. And so she was a powerful figure for us.
But the other person who was a powerful figure for me was my dad. My dad was gentle. People in the community saw him as someone who could help solve problems. The phone rang every night. Someone was wanting help and he was always there. So for me, he was a powerful figure in my life. And he never acted like it was not okay to be Hawaiian like many others that I knew. He just, by example, was just a powerful figure for me.
PH: Sure. Thank you. And then after graduating high school, can you describe your experience transitioning to college and maybe also why you decided to attend college?
CK: It was decided for me (laughs). It was no choice. Both my parents were college graduates. My mother’s mother was a schoolteacher. My father, you know, this was in the 1930s and it was unlikely that a Hawaiian youth would attend college. But through good luck and good genes, he was pulled out of the wharfs at Hilo where he was working as a stevedore after he graduated from high school. He was invited to attend the University of Hawaiʻi on a football scholarship. And that’s how he and my mom met. So going to college was never a choice. It was when you go to college. That’s just the way it was. Plus, I went to a private school and so going to college was not a choice either. It was which college can your parents afford?
PH: Just entering college, can you talk about why you chose to pursue a career in social work and what drew you towards that career path?
CK: There was probably about 13 years between when I got my bachelors and when I went back for a master’s in social work. I always knew I wanted to work with people. My father taught me that. But I didn’t know exactly what. I graduated with a bachelor’s, with a BA, you can’t do anything with a bachelor’s, with a BA. Plus, there were no real experiences the way they are now, you know, you go away for a year, you do internships. There was none of that or none of that that my family could afford to send me away. You know, when I was looking through the questions, I haven’t thought about this for so long. But my first job after I got my BA was working for the telephone company in Portland. I got my BA in Eugene, Oregon. I moved to Portland. I didn’t want to go home. I wanted to experience the world.
My first job was selling telephones at the telephone company. And one of the things I realized, you know, [this] was blatant sexism. At the phone company, we were all in this big room, and there were unit supervisors and then there was a head honcho that oversaw all of the units. The unit supervisors were always women who had been there for years and years and years. The big head honcho was always a man. And men would come and go every six months. So they would come in, and they would be trained by these female unit supervisors who never got promoted to that head honcho spot. There was always a man, and it really grated and irritated me. So I was beginning to develop that sense of what it means to be a girl/woman/female in this culture. And it was just irritating to me because my father treated everybody equally. Everybody.
I came from an athletic family. My father was tapped to coach a women’s team at an insurance company, and he coached that women’s team as if they were men. At some point, they won the championship, and he never discriminated against women. And so part of me was just kind of. . . . That’s how I got started looking at what is now called marginalized populations. And it was just before the feminist movement. So when that came about, I was in. My first personal issues around discrimination was not against being Hawaiian. It was about being female. So then I knew I wanted to work with marginalized people.
My next job was working in a day treatment center for people with serious mental illness. And I really liked that job because we were with clients eight hours a day right there in a day treatment program. And you had to come based on who you were. You could not hide behind a counseling hour, for example. Who you were made whether people got well or not. And I really liked that. And then I was tasked with writing a grant for a residential treatment program for the same population. And I, for some reason, successfully got a million dollars from HUD and then was asked to be the administrator of that. So that’s what got me started in social work from a bachelor’s perspective, working with people with schizophrenia, unrelenting bipolar disorders, and just really being in the moment with people. But after a while, I realized that I needed to get a master’s. Otherwise, I was going to lose my job as the administrator, because by this time the Fed said, “Okay, if you’re running this kind of a program for severely ill people, you have to have more education, for goodness sakes.” So I went to Portland State and got an MSW, and I have been working with marginalized people ever since.
PH: Can you talk about with that grant that you received from HUD and being the administrator there, just some of the challenges that you faced and maybe what your role was? I mean, that sounds like a really big undertaking.
CK: It was. And be reminded that this was the late 70s. The whole idea of community treatment for people with serious mental illness was just coming into being. Prior to that, they were all in the hospital. They were all at the state hospital for years and decades and decades until somebody finally said, “whoa,” you know, these people, we were still calling them “these people”, these people need to have a chance to be in the community. And with now the antipsychotic medications, all of those delusions and hallucinations were now being mitigated by antipsychotic medication. So, people could live in the community and learn community skills and learn to live on their own. And that’s whatʻs now called the community mental health movement that I was fortunate to be a part of. So how to live in a residential facility with 10 other people when you had schizophrenia? That was tough. And one of the ironies is that the community mental health clinics were dealing with what we used to call the “walking wounded”. Clients would come in for their hour counseling sessions and the people who would be providing the therapy were PhDs, but none of them wanted to work in the day treatment center, and the residential facility two blocks up from the day treatment center because that was too hard. And we would say, “well, wait a minute. All of us only have bachelor’s degrees. You guys have PhDs. How come you don’t want to work with this population and you want us to work with this population, and yet you criticize us for not having advanced degrees?” It was an interesting transition at that time. And then what happened was all the biggies in the field who were writing books would look at communities who were trying it, and we were one of the communities in Benton County, Oregon who were trying it. So they would come to our facilities, and they would help train us. I mean, it was just mind boggling that the guy who wrote the book on community mental health was here training us. I mean, it was fabulous. So we got the really good training.
PH: Yeah, I imagine so. Even though you were the administrator, you would also work one-on-one with patients, is that right?
CK: Oh, well, that’s what we did. When you’re the administrator, you are part of the milieu. It’s called milieu therapy. You’re part of the milieu. So one of my jobs, of course, was to teach people how to cook because residents needed to have that skill once they were in their own apartments. So people had to learn to cook. Then we had to go to the grocery store and shop. One of the things that we saw very clearly was that when people were in the residential facility and they were walking around in the community, they often acted out their delusions… One example, I got a telephone call from a pastor of the church one block down, and he said, “I think one of your guys is here.” So I go to the church and sure enough, there’s David talking to Jesus on the cross because one of the things that happens with people with schizophrenia is there’s a lot of religious kinds of delusions. So, I go to the pastor and I say, “let me show you how to talk to David.” So I’m talking to David, and the pastor is listening. And I’m thinking, wow, one of the things we need to do is train the community to not be afraid of people with schizophrenia, particularly since they’re on antipsychotic medications. So then the staff went to all of the grocery stores that our clients and residents frequented, and we gave them our cards. And we say, you know, “when Frank starts talking to Tony the tiger on the Kellogg’s box, this is how you talk to Frank. And if you need help, you call and one of us will be there.” Then we went to the police and we said, if we have to call you, please come, but please don’t pull your guns. You know, we’re there for you. You know, all the things that are happening right now and police get called it. It’s mind boggling how so many people with serious mental illnesses get killed. So we took the step, and this was in the 70s. We went to the police and we said, here’s our cards. Call us if you need to. But if we call you to come to the facility, this is why, and this is what we need, and we will help you talk down our clients. It was because we had training, you know. So it was an opportunity to really help people integrate into the community and to help the community give space to that. I spent a long time talking about this. I haven’t talked about this in years.
PH: Yeah, no that’s fascinating. Thank you for sharing. Did you continue that work of working with people who are experiencing mental illnesses, maybe back here on Oʻahu and helping them reintegrate into society?
CK: I spent 25 years on the continent: 15 years in Oregon, 10 years in California. And I worked with, yes, the same population. In California. I was working with the forensic population, people who were adjudicated not guilty by reason of insanity or incompetent to stand trial as a result of mental illness. When I moved back to Oʻahu, I actually got a job with the Adult Mental Health Division, Department of Health, basically in administration. I did not work one-on-one with clients. I worked with the system.
PH: And then back here on Oʻahu, can you talk about when you first began teaching Hula and then later ho’oponopono?
CK: When I was on the continent, I actually taught Hula for those 25 years. I didn’t have a Halau because I was not a Kumu Hula. But I did teach Hula, and it sustained me. When I moved to California, I joined a Hawaiian Civic Club. So all of that helped me stay connected to the culture and to Oʻahu. So what was the question [laughs]?
PH: Oh, sure. No, just yeah, talking about your background with hula and ho’oponopono, and specifically, when you began teaching those practices.
CK: OK. So when I came back to Oʻahu, when I came back to Hawaiʻi, it was the result of a yearning that I had been experiencing for about a year when I was in California. At some point, I tuned in to whenever I was listening to Hawaiian music or teaching hula at the Civic Club. There is just this yearning and sometimes I would just almost start to cry and I’m thinking, all right, something’s going on. Long story short, I decided that I was going to be standing at Iolani Palace when Hawaiʻi was commemorating the 100th year overthrow of the monarchy. And I was going to be there as a resident. So I made that commitment. I told my family who said, “whoa, really?” I said, “yep, were going home.” So when I came back, I ran back to Hula. My hula genealogy is Auntie Ma’iki Aiu Lake and Kamamalu Klein, and I ran back to Hula, and I realized that I needed more. I mean, I was just so hungry. After being away for twenty five years, I ran back to Hula, and then I decided I wanted to take Hawaiian language because I could sing Hawaiian. I knew the words, I knew what they meant, but I certainly couldn’t speak Hawaiian. So I ran back to Hawaiian language, and then I actually discovered Lua. Lua is the Hawaiian fighting art. I came home in 1992 and the first class in Lua was in 1993, and my brother, who is an Aikido Black Belt was in the first invited class for Lua. And one night I went over to his house, and he was practicing Lua, and I was watching him, and he told me what Lua was. I never heard of it. I was watching him, and I said, “that’s a hula step that you’re doing.” He said, “of course it’s not a hula step. It’s Lua, for goodness sakes.” I said, “no, that’s a hula step.” So I got really interested on how Lua and Hula were connected. And the next year there was another class by invitation only on Lua. And just so you know, I grew up kind of a tomboy. That was the language of the day. I don’t like the term, but everybody knows what a tomboy is. So I grew up as a tomboy. I wanted to be a football player when I grew up because my dad was and was crushed when he told me that girls don’t play football. So I kind of had that in me. And so when the next little class came up, I asked my brother to sponsor me. One of the Olohe or master Lua teachers was Richard Likeke Paglinawan, so I signed up for Lua and for the next 20 years, I guess, practiced it. And Likeke Paglinawan was also a Ho’oponopono Practitioner along with his wife, Lynette. And one of the things about Hawaiian philosophy is there’s always a balance. There’s always a balance. So if you’re going to aggress, if you’re going to fight, then you also need to know some healing. So part of healing is, you know, traditionally the warriors dragged their fallen comrades back to camp and you had to set the bones. So they had to know Lomilomi, they had to know bone setting. They had to know Ho’oponopono. If two chiefs were wanting to fight but they really didn’t, how did they resolve those differences through Ho’oponopono? Likeke used to always teach us about balance. And in lua, balance is also about Ku and Hina. Ku the aggressive, Ku the male. Hina the female, Hina the reclining because in fighting there’s always moving forward and aggression and knowing when to come back and to be defensive. Everything is a balance. So Likeke would always talk to us about balance, and he would use Ho’oponopono as a means of healing. He then started a whole class for interested Lua Practitioners, and I jumped to it. And then those of us who actually completed the class were invited to be advanced students. So he and his wife, Lynette, are my mentors. And at some point we ‘unikiʻd – graduated – became Ho’oponopono Practitioners. At the same time, I was dancing Hula and I was invited in what’s called the pap ‘uniki class, the class that teaches you to be a Kumu Hula. At the time I needed to choose, I could not focus on learning to be a Kumu Hula while still practicing Lua and and learning about Ho’oponopono. I had to give up one. And since I was aging, I thought Lua was the nice thing to give up, so I didn’t break any bones. So at that point I became kind of a passive person in the Lua group and helped out in cultural events. And, you know, Lua is really about learning protocols. That’s where I really learned about protocols. And when you watch Hawaiian organizations and even in Merrie Monarch, the dancing, the men’s dancing became much more Ku, much more masculine. It was because of Lua. So it was really the Paglinawans who introduced me to Ho’oponopono and that’s how I got started.
PH: Thank you so much.
CK: I tell long stories, yeah? I’m sorry.
PH: No, no, thank you. That was really thorough and gave me an understanding of how you not only learned all those different practices, but also how they relate to each other. I really appreciate it. Moving into your retirement, can you talk about how you continued serving the community through your cultural knowledge and also your background in social work?
CK: At some point in my professional career, I went half time with the state because I wanted to work at Salvation Army Women’s Way, which is a residential facility for pregnant and parenting women. The job was so satisfying, and it was so satisfying because these were women who had the choice of going to jail or going to treatment, and they could take their toddler child with them. And if they were pregnant when they gave birth in the facility, they could keep the baby with them. And these women were just gritty. I mean, the stories that they told about trauma, about their individual trauma were pretty horrific that no child should ever have to endure. And yet, these women still had that grain of hope. These women got up every morning and said, “I gotta do this.” Some of them took many tries before they actually were successful. Most of the women were Native Hawaiian. But they just touched my heart, you know, they just touched my heart, so when I retired, I decided that I was going to use my social skills, my hula skills and love of hula and my knowledge about cultural historical trauma because by this time, I was moving into the work of Trauma-Informed care. Trauma-informed care care is a phrase that comes from the federal government who was now beginning to fund trauma services and with the acknowledgment that cultural historical trauma touched so many lives of people of color, Native Americans, indigenous people. It then became my work, and I wanted to blend social work skills, my knowledge about trauma and hula. So I submitted something to the women’s jail, and I called the program Hula as Healing. So a lot of what I do is we dance hula about powerful Hawaiian women, and we tell the stories of Queen Lili’uokalani and other important Hawaiian women and the women get a chance to talk about some of their own issues and some of their own resiliency. So we talk about resiliency and how they can stand in their own truth as women. One of the things that happened was the warden allowed us to dance in the community. So minimum security women, you know, those women that you see on the sides of the roads with sickles, and they’re cutting down weeds, these are minimum security women who can go outside the jail. So with the help of the director of recreation, we got the OK for our minimum security hula dancers to go into the community, dance and tell their stories. Because one of the things about healing is, one of the aspects of healing is the need to tell your story and to tell your story truthfully and to tell your story to people who will listen. So it’s not just important to talk, but you got to tell your story and people need to listen with empathy. And so we would go to churches, we would go to the IVAT Conference (the Institute on Violence, Abuse and Trauma), and they would dance, and they would tell their stories, and they would see that people in the audience were crying because they were impacted and it’s healing. So it has been such an amazing experience. So, you know, I get more out of it than the women do because it just lifts my spirits to see them. And one of the things that I did is, I started a satellite halau in the women’s jail. So it’s not just a recreation come every week teach hula. No, when you come through those doors, you’re going to halau. And what does it mean to be in a halau? It means you have to respect everybody here. You have to respect Kumu. When Kumu speaks, you’ve got to be silent. You got to take off your slippers, and you line up real nice against the wall and you leave all your pilikia, all your problems out there. And if there are any issues, we’re going to sit and we’re going to do modified Ho’oponopono because we can’t have issues going on. You cannot be yelling and talking stink about your sister down this row. Cannot. We’re in a halau and then I have alaka’i, I have helpers who have been in the halau for a while and they help set the rules. So when there’s talking the alaka’i will say, “you can’t talk. Kumu is talking. You got to be quiet or that’s not very respectful.” Or, “if you don’t wanna hula, you can leave and maybe you can come back next week. I don’t have to say that, you know, the alaka’i says that or other people say, “hey, stop it.” So there’s some values and core beliefs and actions and behaviors that come with being in a Halau. So it’s just really satisfying.
PH: Yeah, that’s beautiful. Thank you. Did you, through teaching these women hula and Ho’oponopono have any stories or can you share how you think it impacted those women? Did they talk about how that healing process improved their lives with you at all?
CK: So I don’t want to imply that I do Ho’oponopono with the women in the jail. A Couple of times we have sat down to resolve whatever was going on, you know, and was it Ho’oponopono? Well, I used Ho’oponopono principles, but we didn’t do full-blown Ho’oponopono. Sometimes what happens is the women say… One woman, we were at St. John’s Lutheran Church in Kailua, and we danced at a service.The church members had a snack for us, and they came and they sat down with us and talk story with us. And one of the jail women said, “whoa, this changed the way I see myself.” She said, I always so far have seen myself as a prisoner. I feel like I have a big P on my forehead that says “Prisoner.” And she said, “I have to change that because I want to be sitting in the congregation one day when I get out. I cannot get out with that big P on my forehead.” She said, “something finally clicked in me today. I want to be like these people here, so I have to work really hard at changing that. So it matters that they have an opportunity to be in the community. It matters that they have an opportunity. One of the women said after we did a “Hula as Healing” workshop at the IVAT conference she said, “you know, when I was telling my story, I could see this woman in the audience crying and the haumana said, “she got it, she got my story. And she was crying with me, and that was important because I see myself as not having any value, not OK, and somebody was crying, and then I saw somebody else crying. They got it, they got me.” You know, for someone to say, “they got me” I think is really important.
PH: Yeah, that’s beautiful. Thank you. Can you talk about how your work as a Ho’oponopono practitioner and Kumu Hula changed as a result of the pandemic and maybe some of the challenges that you faced?
CK: For Ho’oponopono, because I have had the same students for three years, going to Zoom was not too bad. One of the things that our training methodology does is that we do role play. Let me go back and say that Lynette and Likeke Paglinawan are also social workers. So role play seems pretty fitting with social work ways of training. So by doing it on Zoom, we still tried kind of successfully to role play even though everybody was Zooming. And I think part of it was after three years, we all trusted each other. I don’t think it would have worked to start a new class by Zoom and then try to role play. But in working with haumana who have been together for three years, that trust was there. So the role play was pretty authentic and pretty successful because people could adopt the roles of family members playing a family who needed to resolve some issues. They could do it with authenticity, and they could trust that the other role playing members were also there and had their backs. And in terms of being authentic, the haku or the person who was facilitating the Ho’oponopono had to be really on it because he or she had to look at all these little squares and figure out some non-verbal issues that were going on. You know, and what they eventually said was in some ways it was helpful because they had to look at each square family member and really try and glean what was going on with that family member because they weren’t sitting with that family member for real. So that was interesting. I also did a Zoom Ho’oponopono with a family, one of whose members was on the continent. And before covid, we would never do that. Before covid we would say to the family, when that family member comes back, then let’s schedule a Ho’oponopono session. But I tried it. I was overall, generally pleased with how Zoom Ho’oponopono could work, I would still not choose it as my first choice. But now the opportunity for family members who are not on Oʻahu with me, there are opportunities there. And I’m just grateful for that.
Let me get to hula. I shut down in person hula somewhere in the spring of 2020 and then started Zooming. It was less than ideal, but not bad because what everybody wanted was connection, they wanted to connect. I mean, everybody was staying at home every day, but the Zoom hula was an opportunity for the haumana to come together and connect. And they were hungry. We were all hungry for that. So one of the things that happened with the hula class, and I think part of it because I’m a social worker, is that we would open with checking in, how are people today? And we would end with are there any announcements? And they would start talking story. Part of the checking in was having some haumana having some concerns about other family members. I remember one incident where there was an issue of potential suicidality. And it just so happens that one of my haumana works for the mental health clinic, and she is one of their suicide prevention trainers. So I had her do a 15 or 20 minute presentation about signs and symptoms of suicidality which was really helpful to the couple of people who were concerned about their family members. So we have that opportunity. The other thing we do in hula is we see ourselves as a community who can aid other communities. So every once in a while I say, OK, this month’s tuition is going to go to Hawaiʻi Food Bank because I don’t have as many expenses, right? I don’t have expenses anymore except for paying rent, and so what happens is that the haumana will give me twice as much or more tuition because they know it’s going to the food bank. And then six months later, I say, OK, this month’s tuition is going to go to IHS. And so they send me more money, and I just send it off to IHS. So we’re learning to be a community within the halau, and we are a community within the community. So we’re just not a hula group coming together. You know, it’s about connecting and connections. And I’m just really pleased about that.
PH: Yeah, that’s wonderful you’re able to find a way to maintain that community even through this pandemic. You talked earlier a little bit about some of your training in cultural historical trauma. And also, I know you mentioned before that you had an awareness of those intergenerational issues within yourself. Could you talk a little bit about the impacts of covid-19, especially on Native Hawaiians and kind of how you saw it through that lens of historical trauma?
CK: It was really sad to see communities distrusting the government, if you will, and that distrust goes way back. That’s what historical trauma was all about. You know, it was about the result of colonization and occupation on a group of people by a dominant group or culture. We have a long history of measles, mumps, syphilis, bubonic plague, the Spanish flu decimating our population. So we’re not alone as a group of indigenous people not trusting what the government says we need to do, and that’s really sad because I’m vaccinated and I do whatever Dr. Fauci says to do. But that’s not true for a large group, so I guess it just makes me sad that once again, our group, the Polynesians, not just Hawaiians, but Polynesians are affected by generations of not trusting. The other thing is over the generations, our health has declined. We used to be a population or a group of people who are robust and healthy. And over the generations, our health has declined. And given that so many of our people are compromised health wise, then that in and of itself, covid hits them. and it just breaks my heart that is still happening and how come we haven’t made, I guess, we have made gains, but not in certain pockets of populations where we are dying and in greater numbers, partly because our health is so compromised and we don’t take the vaccinations.
PH: Do you think maybe at least indirectly, in some ways, hula and Ho’oponopono can help in promoting the general health of the lahui.
CK: That’s a really good question. I think to the extent that our leaders step up. That in hula in Ho’oponopono we talk about health and how we can stay healthy without preaching, you know, that’s one of the things I have to be mindful of because I feel so strongly about it. How do you make space for people with a different perspective? And yet, talk about the risks and benefits and how the risks and benefits of being unvaccinated are not in their favor. You know, and ask them to look at some of the data, some of the science that are coming out of the CDC and the World Health these days. But also talking about, you know, I’m disappointed that so many of us, meaning the larger community, doesn’t act in ways that we have been taught. We have been taught the collective whole, the good of the collective whole is more important than individual needs and individual wants. And I think early on in the pandemic, we saw so much of that. You know, I think Hawaiʻi was really great when the community, because of our Asian values and our indigenous values, came together to say, how can we make our community safer? What do we capital W, capital E, what do we need to do to keep our communities safe? You know, we all wore masks. Nobody said, “yikes.” We all said this is what we have to do. We all distanced. We all did what we were asked to do and then, you know, the liberty individual needs group voices got louder and louder and louder. I’m still grateful we live in Hawaiʻi. I am so scared for those states where those individual freedom principles are taking over. It’s just so sad. And then the other thing is some of those people come to Hawaiʻi. So I’m not happy about that. But it is so sad. I just can’t get over it.
PH: Yeah, going into your personal life, can you talk about how covid-19 has affected you and your family’s day-to-day lifestyle?
CK: Well, because my husband and I are old, we stayed home. I mean, we did everything we were supposed to do. We stayed home, we went to the grocery store during kupuna hours. We went to Longs during kupuna hours if we needed to go. Early on in the pandemic, a friend and I sewed masks. We sewed masks for all kinds of people. Both of our parents were in Pohai Nani retirement home in Kaneohe. We sewed masks for Pohai Nani because at the time, it was hard to get masks. So we sewed masks and sewed masks and sewed masks! My daughter home schooled her kids. She’s got five kids, so I would go twice a week to help out. I still go twice a week. We give to the food bank. We try and be good community members. We give to the food bank, IHS, Salvation Army. Trying to help our community get on its feet, but yeah, I taught Hula by Zoom. The women’s jail closed down for all programing by volunteers, so I didn’t get to see them for a year. And then I just started going back probably six weeks ago. And what’s kind of ironic is that the women’s jail is probably one of the safest places because they don’t go anywhere and they’re really good about if a staff person tests positive, everything shuts down. So the day before my first day back after a year an employee tested positive, they shut down everything. I mean, absolutely. Once the testing came in, shut down everything, I had to get tested to come back in. I just went back, but we follow all the rules. My husband and I just follow all the rules. We were crazy first off, you know, I would go to the grocery store and then I would put all of the food on the bench near the back door, and I would leave it there for 24 hours before bringing it in. All of the perishables I would put in the outside refrigerator and didn’t touch them for 48 hours. And then when I brought in any takeout food I would put it on a towel, you know, take out the food. I mean it was crazy. Take out the food, put it in one of my bowls and then throw the styrofoam and the plastic away. My goodness. And then spray down everything with alcohol. I mean we followed all the rules.
PH: Still, I can remember those early days of the pandemic kind of taking all those extra precautions. Are there any ways that covid-19 has transformed how you think about your family or friends or your general community at large?
CK: It’s all about connections, isn’t it? I mean, we’ve really missed those connections. I am proud of our community in general. I am proud of how we step up. I am proud that our indigenous and Asian values guide how we stand as a community member, as a family member. I wish people everywhere had the same upbringing that we had. I have three standing Zoom gathering’s. One for my friends from high school. In fact, we just did a Zoom yesterday. One from our friends from California, and one from some of my colleagues from the School of Social Work. So every month we have Zoom because it’s important to stay connected. We try and reach out to people who might be isolated. So yeah I think the lesson for all of us is staying connected and the value of those connections and how we stand on the shoulders of our ancestors and others in our “successes” or who we are today. We need to honor people in our past. We need to honor people who have helped us and supported us, and then we need to give that support to others. I mean, it’s everything that we were taught as kids, for goodness sakes.
PH: Yeah, absolutely. Thank you, Malina. Well, I really appreciate your time today and everything that you’ve already shared. Are there any anything else you want to add or any closing thoughts that you’d like to leave with?
CK: You mean I haven’t talked enough? (laughs) I don’t know. Did I miss anything?
PH: No, I don’t think so. It was wonderful hearing all your insights and especially about some of the earlier days in Hawaiʻi that you were just describing from your childhood all the way up to now. It was wonderful. So thank you for your time today.
CK: OK, thank you. Thank you very much. Take care.
PH: You too. With that, I’ll stop the recording.