Dr. Sheri-Ann “Sheri” Pualani Daniels is the Executive Director of Papa Ola Lokahi where she has served since April of 2016. Sheri grew up in Pukalani, Maui before moving to Oʻahu to attend Kamehameha Schools Kapālama Campus from 7th to 12th grade. Sheri holds degrees in counseling psychology and has worked extensively in social service organizations across the state. One key issue Sheri tackled during the pandemic was data collection on Native Hawaiians and Pacific Islanders (NHPIs). At the helm of Papa Ola Lokahi, Sheri teamed up with numerous other community based organizations to disaggregate COVID-19 data collected on NHPIs with the goal of giving NHPIs a voice on policy, data, communication, and social support.
Interview Details
- Narrator: Sheri-Ann Pualani Daniels (SD)
- Interviewer: Stephen Pono Hicks (PH)
- Recording Date: 7/28/2021
- Format: Zoom video
- Location: Honolulu, Hawaiʻi
- Keywords: Maui, Kamehameha Schools, Native Hawaiian health, Pacific Islander health, data governance, data sovereignty, parenting
Interview Transcript
PH: Hello, today is July 28, 2021. This is an interview with the Center for Oral History at the University of Hawaii at Manoa for our Hawaii Life in the Time of COVID-19 project. The Time is 1:05 pm, and this interview is being conducted via Zoom. I am in Honolulu on Zoom and we are here today with Dr. Sheri Daniels. Thank you for your time today, Sheri. It’s a pleasure to be with you. Just for the record, can you please state your full name?
SD: It’s Sheri-Ann Pualani Daniels.
PH: Thank you, Sheri. And where were you born?
SD: I was born in Wailuku, Maui.
PH: Okay, can you describe the environment that you grew up in?
SD: I grew up in. . . . My mom’s family. . . . My mom’s parents were pure Hawaiian from Maui. My dad actually is from North Carolina, originally came here in the military. And so I guess a very mixed blended family, but really more influenced by my mom’s family or my Hawaiian side because that’s who really raised us while my parents worked. So just that influence of having my grandparents really be active in my life when I was growing up.
PH: Can you talk a little bit about how your family instilled in you a sense of your Hawaiian heritage and identity growing up?
SD: Sure. You know, I think I grew up in the mid to I guess. . . . Early mid-70s, early 80s, I think was probably, I guess, my childhood. I grew up on Maui, so very small town. And I don’t think you realize it’s a small town until you come to Oʻahu for college and all of that and realize, wow, it’s really quite a smaller community where everyone knows everyone. But I think I grew up in a time where it wasn’t necessarily popular to be Hawaiian or something you really outwardly demonstrated. I think there were folks that really started to push that cultural resiliency envelope with Hōkūleʻa and Kahoʻolawe. But my family wasn’t that. I think we were those Hawaiians that really tried to stay under the radar. And so beyond hula when I was a little kid, you know, it wasn’t something that was as openly discussed or talked about as it is today. And so I think culturally, there was this almost like a hibernation period almost in my family where my grandparents spoke Hawaiian. But I didn’t really get to experience that till they were really older. And I think that’s really kind of sad. And I wish I had more of that. And my mom was from that generation that it was safer to not really put it out there that you were Hawaiian. So I think that really stuck with me in the sense of going to Kamehameha at Kapālama it really, I think, broadened my world view of what it was to be Hawaiian. And so I think when you go from really limited to this whole different world, that becomes kind of your bar. And then as I went to college, I realized that that may not necessarily be the only bar, that there is a really a different way of figuring out what it means to be Hawaiian. There are different ways somebody identifies it and there’s no right or wrong. But I think there is definitely different bubbles of what it means to be Hawaiian. And I think it continues it continues to evolve even today.
PH: And you talked about that transition of going to Kamehameha Schools and then college, how that expanded your worldview a little bit. Could you also just describe that transition going to Kamehameha Schools and then also in college? Because I know that you were… That was also a brand new island for you as well. Can you describe that transition for you?
SD: Yeah, you know, again, I think coming from Maui, where it is a really small community, right, that I went to a school that was predominantly Asian and Filipino and the other Hawaiians that were in the school with me, they came from like a housing, you know, they came from Harbor Lights. So it was a little bit more low-income family. So you have this very. . . . Looking back now I think this very interesting kind of space where being Hawaiian, you weren’t often lumped with maybe the smarter kids, right. It was very. . . . It was very stereotypical. And so at the school I was at, I was very fortunate that I got to be placed in a, I guess back then and probably it’s not PC now, the gifted and talented group. But, you know, looking back, I realized that there wasn’t a lot of other kids that looked like me. I mean, really, it wasn’t. And so coming to Kamehameha I think was this ability to be with people that looked like me, talk like me, like, you know, just it was very different. It was like almost felt like a homecoming. And I think for me, it was when I went to explorations, I had that it was like, this is where I want to come. But I didn’t know what that meant or how I would make that happen. And luckily for me, the counselor at my school was like, this is what we’ve got to do. And not that my parents weren’t wanting that for me, I don’t think they knew how. We didn’t have anybody else in our family at the time that went to Kamehameha. So you know going to Kamehameha, especially on a neighbor island, I mean, that’s a big thing. So I think as excited as they were for me, I think they were also very unsure of what that meant because I would be going when I was in seventh grade. And so what did that mean for them and having their child away. But I think my first year was probably the hardest, only because I wasn’t going for months at a time away from my family, and so you kind of learn how to be independent. I think if anything in my life that those six years were probably the best years of my life because I learned how to be independent and how to, you know, figure things out, whether it’s doing your own laundry, buying your own supplies, so you can survive. Not that it was like you were destitute, but it was you had no choice but to figure it out, to navigate the bus system and to be in spaces that you had to really figure out how to navigate and how to think on your feet and those things that I think it’s really hard to teach if you don’t have the experience. So I think my first year was really hard. And then after that it was like, you know, like like second nature.
PH: And so you’re in this position now at Papa Ola Lokahi as the director, which is an organization very much devoted to improving well-being of the lāhui and promoting Native Hawaiians. Can you talk about, though, just over the course of your career, the positions that you’ve held as they relate to serving the community and improving the well-being of the lāhui? And maybe what first sparked your interest in that field as well in that career pursuit?
SD: Yeah, so I thought when I was in high school and I’m going to college that I actually wanted to go into medicine. I really was thinking I wanted to go into obstetrics and do that kind of work. And then reality of college and the fact that I suck at science and I struggled with organic chemistry and the sciences that’s required to kind of be in the medical field. And I think that was a reality that I had. But I also recognized that I think I really just wanted to be in a helping profession. And so I kind of was not drawn to social work. I think my perceptions of it were not really engaging with people, but more paper pushing. So I actually went into family resources and then into counseling psychology. Because I really at that point, I started working in my bachelor’s program at a women’s substance abuse treatment center. And that was I found really different. Interesting. It really, I think, tapped into my wanting to help. But just that the whole clinical piece and helping was what kind of attracted me.
And then as I went for my master’s, I started to recognize that I really wanted to do work around the criminal justice piece. So incorporating counseling and that. So I was able to get into the drug court program and did the case management for the co-occurring disorder, the chronically mentally ill and some of those specialized populations and found that I really enjoyed that. And my supervisor at the time was really supportive and said, you know, “You really need to maybe get some administrative background.”
That’s probably something that is not really common for I think women but also Native Hawaiian women to be in kind of those administrative roles, those policy or those program making roles. And so I was able to kind of do that out of the state system and gain some experience that way. I did that in Hilo and then also back on Maui, at Child & Family Service where I did the bulk of my career, about 12 years there, working in different programs from child abuse and neglect to domestic violence to behavioral health. So a range of it.
And I think for me I really enjoyed the work. I enjoyed helping families and people. But one of the kind of continuing thread was that it always seemed to be more Native Hawaiian clients in all of these areas. And that really is what the research shows or the statistics shows, right, that Hawaiians tend to be higher in those areas that are not really positive: higher incarceration, higher youth, foster care, higher in the criminal justice system, lower education retention. So all those things we were seeing kind of in the programmatic side. So I did that. I was also doing private practice and doing substance abuse assessments, things like that, and I recognized that I can do all this work with families or with individuals. But if we don’t change the way policies are in terms of programming and all of those things, then we’re just cycling, right. We’re just. . . . It becomes generational because I started to see that I was working with kids whose grandparents I had seen maybe a decade earlier, or it becomes very common to see those family names.
So I was able to go back to the judiciary for about five years and worked both in drug court and in the special services branch overseeing procurement, contracting. So I was able to see the policy end of it and recognized that I really need to be on the almost on the upstream that can help divert resources and really set the tone with community engagement on how we deliver services in a different way, more engaging, more community driven, more individual driven. So that’s actually what got me over to Papa Ola Lokahi.
PH: Okay, thank you. And you also talked about kind of being bothered seeing Hawaiians in some of those not so great places, incarceration and just with domestic issues. Do you think you wouldn’t have been as sympathetic to those issues if you hadn’t had the chance to go to a place like Kamehameha Schools and really become more acquainted with your background as a Hawaiian? And maybe if you had instead just stayed in Maui, where you kind of talked about how the school system there’s more of a stereotypical mindset towards Hawaiians. Do you think that that background kind of helped you be more empathetic and concerned to those issues and not just to view it as, you know?
SD: I don’t know. I think, and this might sound very bad coming out, but there’s a reason why I’m going to say this. I think Kamehameha provides a fantastic, probably the best Western education any Native Hawaiian could have that sets you up to be successful in the Western world. I’m just talking from when I went to school. I know things have very much changed, but if you look at it from that perspective, yes. I mean, the resources available to you is phenomenal. Could I have done that if I stayed on Maui? Well, I think the resources would be lacking. Definitely. However, I do want to believe that part of that ability is also my own sense of resilience. And I see that now because I think I’m older. I can be much more objective around this and maybe understand that a little bit more. In my 20s or 30s, I might not have said the same thing. But I think I would have been just as successful. If I stayed home, I think I would have set up those opportunities. I think I would have been probably a little bit more rough around the edges and maybe not as polished in how I can present that stuff. And I think that’s what Kamehameha provided is the rounding and the polishing that I can still voice it. I can still advocate. But in doing so, I do it in a way that is not so combative, maybe. And so passionate in the way that you can have passion and you can funnel your passion in multiple ways. But I think when you don’t have the resources or that kind of softening, it doesn’t come out as polished. So I think Kamehameha provided that definitely. I still think I would have been as successful. I think it might have taken me a little longer to figure out the different systems to navigate. But yeah, I think maybe what I would have bumped up against is maybe not having the support to let me fly and to motivate me or push me along. I don’t think I would have had that as easily if I stayed on Maui. I think I got that from Kamehameha because you have those resources. So I think definitely that would have been my experience.
PH: Yeah. So I guess, in other words, you always have seen yourself on this trajectory regardless of environment or system of being in a place of helping improve the lives of Native Hawaiians and especially as it relates to your background and the capacity that you have to do that.
SD: Yeah, and I think a lot of it is because I grew up in a family that I was the first to go to college, you know, my parents work two, three jobs. We weren’t even I mean, I think we were middle class, right. But also, you know, my parents worked. They were blue collar workers. So you know when you want more for your kids, right. But I think for my parents, you know, they’re wanting more was me being a productive community participant, you know, not get pregnant, have a good job. I really worked for the state because, you know, that’s the lifetime benefits, and you know, stay out of trouble. It wasn’t about go and get your doctorate, right. That was really not in their world.
So I think that’s just. . . . And you know my brother dealt with drugs, and we’ve had family members with DV [domestic violence] issues, so I had those things that we were challenged with as a lāhui in my own backyard. So I kind of knew what it was like to have my parents struggle financially, have them work, like how do we survive? You know, I had family members who were dealing with addiction and incarceration and domestic violence, mental health, all of those things. So I think the difference was I recognized that could be anybody, right. It didn’t matter what kind of Hawaiian family keeps them. Some were just a little bit harder than others, but I think it goes back to resiliency, however, that is for a person.
PH: Yeah, I’m glad you went back to your background and talked about that a little bit more. And I love that theme of resiliency. I can definitely see that through your life. So thank you. Before we talk about some of the COVID-19 questions, can you talk a little bit about some public emergencies or natural disasters that you’ve experienced over your lifetime prior to COVID-19?
SD: I think probably the one that’s vivid is Hurricane Iwa and Hurricane Iniki. And I think Iwa, I remember walking to school, they used our school as a shelter. But it was just this buzzing of the community. I was in kindergarten I believe at the time, you know, I don’t think you make the connection of like, “Oh, there’s there’s a hurricane,” right.
I think there must have been at least one or two times I remember there had to have been a tsunami alert or warning because we pile in the car and head up country to Pukalani. I remember, like, all the cars lined up watching, like because you can see down into Kahului and just waiting right and like, “What are we watching for?” But it’s thinking is that it’s the wave, but it’s those things.
And Iniki I was a lot older. I was in my first or second year of college. And the reason why I remember that is because my husband is from Kauaʻi and how he had to kind of go, okay, what’s going on with his parents? You can’t just jump on a plane and go check on them, right. And so his own kind of like, okay, how can I be helpful and useful when you really can’t be? And so those were probably the highlights that I remember growing up.
PH: Did you notice at all any, I guess especially on Maui, kind of resiliency in the community or just banding together, kind of people forming allyship during that time, like working together to protect each other and ensure each other’s well-being?
SD: Well, I think the one thing with neighbor islands is you, I don’t know if that’s any different than any other challenge that the community faces. So you see that if somebody was killed in a car accident, you know, like the people around the community rallies. I think that’s just the nature of those small communities, which maybe are not as visible today in kind of the every day.
But we saw it with COVID just that resurgence of small communities coming together regardless of anything, right. It’s just, we’re here to help. But I think growing up on Maui, that was just kind of the norm. I don’t think I saw that as different or I saw it more because it was a natural disaster. I think we just saw it whenever somebody needed help, the community rallied. The team needed to go to states, so everybody came together to make sure that this baseball team could go to states. Somebody was sick. I mean, it was just whatever the occasion, it was that rallying to be supportive. I think we saw that always. So I think maybe the difference for me was coming to Oʻahu and that not being as prevalent, maybe it was here, but it was so diluted because it’s just different. More urban, perhaps or I just wasn’t part of those those kind of outlying rural communities that you do hear that there’s that kind of coming together.
PH: Thank you. And then you mentioned it already briefly, but in the present disaster, so to speak, that we’re in today, can you talk about when you first became aware of COVID-19 and then when you also became concerned maybe that it could pose a threat to Hawaiʻi?
SD: So it was April of 2020 almost a year and a half ago, perhaps. There was an article that came out that talked about the number of Native Hawaiian/Pacific Islander COVID positive cases. And when you read this article, it was written with some colleagues on the continent, and they mentioned Hawaiʻi and things like that, which, you know, kind of perks my ears up. And looking into it, I kind of was like, I don’t know if that’s really accurate to say that it impacts NHs [Native Hawaiians] as they were saying it impacting Pacific Islanders. So myself and Dr. Keawe Kahalupua from the Department of Native Hawaiian Health at JABSOM talked and kind of said, “Hey, you know what? If this is what they’re seeing on the continent, we really need to bring our people together here and start to address which maybe this wave that’s coming.”
And so at the time, we brought together two additional co-leads to form a Native Hawaiian/Pacific Islander COVID Hawaiʻi team. And we included a representative from the COFA [Compacts of Free Association] community, which was We are Oceania with Josie Howard and then also Felea’i Tau from PE’A [Pasefika Empowerment and Advancement] who represented a lot of the other Polynesian communities. And together we formed the team and really looked at creating sub-teams, so Pacific Islanders and Native Hawaiians could address those unique pieces. But then we also put together committees under them that looked at policy, that looked at data, that looked at communications and messaging, social support and recovery, because how do we move through this? But then what about after, right. As well as at the time testing, contact tracing, that committee has actually evolved to also include isolation and vaccinations. So that committee has evolved based on the last year and a half.
And it was about 20 organizations we brought together to really start looking at how do we address this. One, we didn’t want to negate any work that was already being done, but what we did was we invited all these people to the table and we said, “Okay, how do we work together to address this, to be the voice, to provide some guidance to the Department of Health and to state policymakers?” right. We also said that, so include inclusive. We weren’t excluding anyone, but we were saying let’s come together.
The second piece was we wanted to look at data. This article that came out that kind of was the catalyst for us really showed us that when we continue to aggregate NHPIs [Native Hawaiian and Pacific Islanders], you don’t always tell the full story. And that’s, I mean, and that’s if they’re collecting and not all states collect it separately. And so that, I think, was an issue that resurged. Data and data sovereignty didn’t just come up with COVID; this has been kind of there for decades. So that was also important for us to start really looking at how data plays a role in this.
And then third, we want it to be at the table, right. If you’re going to be looking at us and we already knew that as Hawaiians, Native Hawaiians, we have a higher prevalence of chronic conditions, right. Diabetes, cardiovascular cancer, all of these things, socioeconomics. We knew that we could be really impacted by this. When we also look at engagement strategies, Hawaiians are very. . . . The best way to describe us is we’re very pack-like, right. We’re very communal. So it’s the trusted partner. It’s the relationships that matter. So now you’re in this space of really uncertainty. That’s the time to really pull into these trusted partners, which are communities which are embedded in communities. And that’s often. . . . We recognize and we were trying to avoid, but it’s often in conflict with how systems operate. The department’s different agencies are not necessarily based on that. It’s checking the boxes, so that already provides some potential conflicts, which has played out. But also we wanted to have space at the table to make decisions, to be included in conversations and not just done because we check a box and there’s resources that come for us, but it never comes to us. It comes for us, but not to us. And so that was really the premise of creating this team.
Through it, we currently are at 60+ organizations really looking at. . . . We’ve called a lot of the things out, especially around engaging communities and messaging that I think we wish they would have picked up earlier. But nonetheless, they pick it up after the fact. But I think it just highlights some of the realities of how we are seen as a community in our state and what possible changes needs to happen to kind of change that trajectory for us, because we’ll continually be fighting to pivot or move the dial. But if we don’t have all those other things, we’ll just keep going in circles, chasing our tails, and then the disparities just continue to grow, right. So I think COVID has kind of highlighted that for us, unfortunately.
PH: I love that collaboration that you talk about because it seems like initially maybe part of the concern with the data collection was the fact that NHPIs were being lumped together, right. But even still, you had this idea of even though that was maybe one of the issues, you still actually did encourage collaboration between various NHPIs so there was working together, but also seeing how we can work together to help each other resolve our respective issues. Can you talk a little bit about the how that collaboration helps maybe build upon relationships that Papa Ola Lokahi already had with other Native Hawaiian and Pacific Islander organizations and then also maybe some of the new relationships that were formed as a result of the collaboration?
SD: I think one of the things that we recognize at POL [Papa Ola Lokahi] is one, we’re not a service delivery organization. Right. We’re really great about bringing community voice to the forefront, but also being the bridger and connecter. Some people call it collective impact, the backbone. I think it’s a mixture of things. But we really said it’s not about us. It’s about our community. And if we’re doing this for the community and the people that we serve, then of course, we got to do it. It wasn’t about any funding. We did not get any funding for, I want to say, at least six months, maybe eight months into it. And then what happened was those moneys that came in all went right back out into community partnerships. So we demonstrated that when we put communities first, that’s what really helps drive the bus.
But the challenges. . . . I think we had to really be clear that we recognize that the system–and that could be state agencies, government legislators, right, resource holders is what I call them–they don’t change the way they behave. The system has an inability to pivot and be fluid to adjust. They set up things that if this happens, like any natural disaster, we all know when we hear the sirens, this is what we do. We’re kind of like Pavlov’s kind of thing. We’re trained that way. So these systems really don’t have the mechanisms to pivot. They’re what I call lifers. This is what they’ve done always. That this is what it is, and unless the resources make them change their process or a federal entity makes them change their process, the process isn’t going to change.
So I think for POL, we recognize the realities of what those barriers are, whether they’re big barriers, small barriers, they’re barriers. But that didn’t stop us from continuing to push for the community to be at the front and center. I think that’s a big thing, because if we’re doing it for our own benefit or our own uplifting, then we’ve already started off on the wrong foot. But it’s never about us, and I think culturally that’s something that’s very important and integral is we never do anything because it’s an individual game. We do something because the community and the collective has benefit. Now doesn’t work out perfectly. Sometimes we fall down and we get back up. That’s a nice thing with the collective right. When one falls and they kind of like trip over, there’s others that can pull us up. The challenges though, the system, the resources, resource holders set up mechanisms that don’t always benefit us. It might support the larger community, but it doesn’t really support and benefit us, and that’s why we continue to struggle with improving our health outcomes. So I think for people, it was really utilizing our already established relationships and the trust people had in us. To say, “come with us, join us.” It’s not about what we gain, it’s about what our communities take from this.
To me, the evidence is the growth rate has started at 20 and now you’re at 60. That means we’re doing something right. But it also means that being a good partner means that you also step back and let other people get recognized because, you know, the smaller communities that are busting their backsides don’t get recognized. So how do we give them that stage to show that we kind of know what to do? We have been doing it. How do we demonstrate trust, and that’s how. Because that’s what we do as a community, as a lāhui? And I think sometimes those pieces of cultural value and cultural belief and cultural action is all said but not done. It goes back to trust. At the end of the day, it goes back to trust.
And I realize in my rule, one, I don’t talk for anybody but my own organization. Two, I never put my organization as above anything else. Our hands are just as in the dirt or in the loʻi as everybody else’s. It doesn’t matter. I think that’s a very Hawaiian way. Doesn’t matter if you’re a CEO or you’re picking up trash as an ʻōpala picker. In those spectrums, we all have contributions to our people. We just have different functions to make that happen. So I think that’s really important for me.
PH: I love that emphasis on the value of community, and I think that’s probably really contributed to your success in your work, putting an emphasis on that, too. So thank you. Can you talk a little bit about… So just going back to the data collection, when you first read the article, this was something that really stood out to you, and it became a really large-scale effort. I mean, compared to when it started and where it is now, you know, 60 plus organizations and you mentioned the first eight months of not even receiving funding, like there wasn’t a monetary benefit for you and putting such an effort into this research. And I know data collection was only one-half of it, but can you just talk a little bit about why seeing that article and the issue of data collection stood out to you so significantly? Like why it wasn’t just an important issue, but it was really so vital and critical that it was worth all this effort that you’ve gone into?
SD: Well, I think because data is believed to bring in resources. Data tells the story. Good or bad data is what people use to get funding to get resources or benefits. So if the data that’s collected about us for us on us is not accurate, then those pieces are impacted. So we know that when we collect data for Native Hawaiians in particular, there is a difference when you’re collecting data on Native Hawaiians here in Hawaii versus the diaspora or those that live on the continent. Because when you talk about resources, what’s available, their connection to culture, all of those pieces are important in what comes out of the data. Because if I look at something and I say, “Oh, NHs, okay, who is this? Like, where is it?” Because if it’s in Hawaiʻi, data collected on Native Hawaiians in Molokaʻi may look very different than the data collected from urban Honolulu. Yeah. Waiʻanae may look very different from Hilo. So that’s why it’s important to to really look and understand how and where and what data is being collected.
Now you throw in the continent, that’s a whole other piece. But we know that Hawaiians are not collected singularly. We are often added with pieces, and we’re often sometimes even added with the Asian-Americans. So that’s where that’s important because if federally we should be only lumped with PIs, which that doesn’t help them either, it doesn’t tell the whole story. So we often are told, “Well, that’s too small of a data set. There’s not very many of them. So it’s not important to collect.” But it actually really is important because that creates a baseline and that can really show need.
Well, what COVID has shown us is that, one, the State of Hawaiʻi is the only state that actually separated out Native Hawaiians in their COVID positive cases. That’s really unique. No other state has done that, which then showed us that, oh, it can be done. But that’s when it stopped. They only did it for that. So when we talk about, you know, growing up, I used to always be told, “If you got to ask how you can help, don’t ask.” You just go and help. And that’s kind of the thing with this data. If you guys can do it in one, then you should be doing it across. It shouldn’t be just for the COVID positives. Why can’t we collect it on all of it? Well, because it’s not collected consistently. There’s all these other barriers that had come up from it. But it’s not only the Department of Health. Well, why can’t we collect this in other state agencies? So it starts to broaden the ask.
The other thing is when we look at data that’s collected, we want it to be aggregated because we want to see how this really does impact us. How does this help our community or not? And so that’s where I think data is really important is it really does tell our story. We’re a very oral society. But that in itself is data rich. So data isn’t just number crunching. Data is all the other stuff. Like this, this oral history like that’s data rich. So how do we capture all of that and not be so number crunching driven in data? And I think that’s kind of figuring out where that balance is for us. I’m just going to throw this out because now we saw during COVID that PIs had this large number, but yet, there are a small population. Well, starting in the ending of May, the numbers of Native Hawaiians that were COVID positive has actually exceeded the Pacific Islanders. So that’s really important when we talk about data because now you’re asking why is that what happened? What triggered that? What drove that? That’s what data does. Data gets you to critically think about how come something happened. What do we do different? How do we maybe correct that, maybe do it different later. So that’s the value of data.
PH: Thank you for sharing that. I think that’s really important. And you also mentioned with the state of Hawaii being the only state that was separating Native Hawaiians from Pacific Islanders and I was just with positive COVID cases. Do you see, at least here locally in the state of Hawaiʻi, your collaboration and the research that you conducted this past year with these other Native Hawaiian and Pacific Islander groups. . . . Do you see that giving you some agency to help change that on the state level and changing those policies and how we collect data on Native Hawaiians and other issues that pertain to that?
SD: One of the cool things with this team is in our data and research committee, we actually had the Department of Health folks there who were doing this data who said we need to be able to separate and aggregate this. And I think it was through that collaboration and really through that that coming together that they were able to do it. What also came up was the Office of Hawaiian Affairs put out in their legislative package this past year, the 21st century data governance. But part of that was to start having the state recognize the value of accurate data collection and to desegregate those data sets especially when we look at the amount of dollars that come into the state from the federal government specifically targeting work for Native Hawaiians. Well, if we’re not collecting the data, how would we know that the moneys that come in are actually used in the way it should and what do we get out of that? How does that improve our Native Hawaiians in whatever way those funds come in?
PH: And you mentioned earlier, you know, it was always important to keep the seat open at the table. And that certainly is reflected in just how many organizations have participated and been members of his team. Do you think that the large scale of the project kind of helped influence and help the Department of Health and other state agencies see the significance of it and realize this wasn’t just Papa Ola Lokahi but this wide-scale collaboration was actually something significant? Do you think that leaving a seat open at the table helped give you more influence having more members?
SD: Okay, so if I really am bluntly truthful, no. I think, unfortunately, the system and the mechanism in which the system operates, really, that’s not the way we operate. And so I think they struggle with—I think they can provide seats at the table, that’s not the problem. But just providing a seat doesn’t mean that you’re actively engaging with that community because I can invite everybody to the table. Yeah, but do I take what they bring and apply it in a meaningful way and not just giving them the seat but actually taking and actually demonstrating that? That’s the difference. Because as Hawaiians, it’s not just, “Okay, I get this, but it’s show me, don’t tell me.”
And I think that’s the difference from our culture is because typically when we get blown off, we just kind of go, “Ah pau poho already,” and you move on. But I think that’s the problem is we know we can’t do that any longer, that we got to kind of say, “Hello. Thank you for inviting me. But if you’re just going to tick a box and tokenize me to sit here at the table, that’s not helpful for my community.”
So I want to know, and I think this is where as Hawaiian leaders, we have to be okay in that difficult conversation to say, “Department of whatever, thank you for giving me the space. I appreciate it. But I’m here to actually push for change for my people and for our community. And if my participation is not meaningful or doesn’t have that, then I’m sorry.”
Or the other thing is to say, “I’m glad I’m looking around the only Hawaiian at this table in a space that really we take up. . . . We should be more of us here. And why is there not two more seats at the table?” So I think it’s those kinds of statements and conversations that we need to have as leaders.
For myself personally, I have been in spaces where there isn’t a PI. And I don’t speak. I make that very clear. I do not speak on behalf of Pacific Islanders. So I usually will say, “Do you not have a Pacific Islander representation? That’s not me.” Because if that was important to them, they would make space for them.
So then it’s like, “Can we have another chair,” or “It’s okay that maybe this table is not the table that’s appropriate for me, and I’m going to go build my own.” And that’s kind of what the 3R was. We built our own, so we know we can. I don’t think it’s being a jerk about it or being arrogant. It’s just being honest that the way sytems have behaved is not helpful, and it’s not conducive to improving the health and well-being of our people. If my role is to ask the question, I think that’s what this year and a half has done is have us asked the question. Because I don’t have to waste a seat, but there needs to be better representation. So you can’t just put me in and check a box, but that’s not what as Native Hawaiians we’ve been taught to behave like. So that’s really I think a difference that COVID has kind of brought out.
PH: Yeah. I appreciate you making that distinction. I want to focus now specifically on the Native Hawaiian community especially with all the research that you’ve done in collaboration this past year. How do you envision Native Hawaiian health in a post-pandemic world? And do you see ways that we can better equip and protect our lāhui from future public health crises?
SD: Okay, that’s a really loaded question.
PH: Yeah, maybe we can start with the first one (laughs) post pandemic world kind of going forward.
SD: Well, so I think in the post pandemic world whenever that happens, so I definitely strongly believe that it has to be more than just we can no longer operate in silos. Health can’t just be health. It really has to almost like break the walls open so that we can reach across to the other silos of education and housing and economics and resource management. All of those pieces are important. So I guess the way I envision it is at one point we were a woven and at some juncture, it was necessary, but I don’t know who determined this, that we’re better off to unweave the mat. And that each piece or each strand should be its own silo. We should operate separately. Health should have its health pathways, education, all of that. We can run parallel to each other. We might cross over each other, but we don’t intersect. We don’t weave back together. So I do think that in this direction we go into we need to start reweaving in pieces. We need to start kind of building that together kind of like a braid because I don’t know any Hawaiian who really only has issues related to education or only issues related to housing. That’s not what we see. We see Hawaiian families, Hawaiian people struggling with how do I manage my diabetes? How do I manage being laid off from work, and how do I deal with mental health? How do I get my kids prepared to go back to school? All of those factors are not just one thread. There are multiple threads coming together. I think that’s what we’re going to need to look at, is how do we weave ourselves together? That is going to take trust. That’s going to take really partnerships and collaborations that maybe we haven’t engaged in over decades because we didn’t have to.
If we look at the landscape of resource management, resource management meaning money, funding, perceived power, whatever that resource is it was very siloed, and organizations or entities hoarded that power. They didn’t want to share. It was like, “I’m going to do this and even if it’s not 100% in my wheelhouse, I’m still going to do it because it’s money.” Versus “Okay, I have this loaf of bread of resources. I’m going to share it with Pono. Maybe he’s going to get like a piece. Here you go. And I’m going to share it. I may keep a larger piece, or I might break them and give it all away.” But really what we need to do is have almost like that hub where we do that, but we make sure people recognize that you guys are all the spokes that get the tire moving. That we all play an important role and that there’s more than enough resources if we really trust each other to behave in a way that what is the intent that we’re doing and that’s to uplift our community.
Now, that might sound very like rainbows and lollipops and unicorns, but really, if you look in our culture, that’s what it was. We had systems in place that we had people that lived by the ocean, and they managed the resources of the ocean. And we have people that lived up mauka who managed those and they shared that because they recognized that if the person down in the ocean is struggling so will up. It’s that balance of cycle of life almost. But when we start getting very greedy, intentionally greedy, then it doesn’t help. Then it becomes the resources get hoarded and the people that need it don’t necessarily get it. Because it’s kind of like bottlenecked. It hasn’t come down. So that’s where it impacts our communities because nothing has gone down, so I think that’s where we’re going to need to move forward is really, how do we reestablish trust in entities with entities between entities? How do we change the way we think around collaborations and partnerships? People always talk about, “Oh, we got to collaborate, you got to have partnerships.” Those are really wonderful words, but they’re only words if there’s no action that’s put to it.
And I often tell people, to me there’s three levels. There’s teamwork. We have this project we’re doing as a team. Great. We’re done. Not that we didn’t get along, but the need to trust is minimal. But then when we get to the collaboration, maybe this is our second time we’ve come together. I know how you did the first time. Okay, we already have a little history together. It’s almost like now we’re dating. The first time we kind of looked at each other across the room. Now we’re dating. There’s a little bit more skin in the game. And if something happens that this collaboration ended, we’d kinda be bummed because there’s a relationship here. Now, when you start talking partnership, that’s like we’re moving in. We’re getting married. That is, you are investing trust in this other person, but you’re doing it because it’s the person. So say we go into partnership, and you’re with one organization. I’m with another, but you retire. Somebody else comes in, somebody who’s been there. Maybe it’s been your number two person. But my relationship is with you, not with them. The dynamics will shift. That’s just kind of how life is. But if we had a breaking of that partnership, and we say, “Okay, we’re going to divorce,” it’s pretty hurtful. It’s pretty traumatic. And that’s the same with when we talk about engagement with organizations. It’s the same thing.
As Hawaiians, we’re very emotionally driven people. Nothing wrong with that. But we’re very passionate. So that also plays a role in it. Trust. I can’t say that enough. If I don’t trust you and I’m not going to go very far. So I think I recognize that in my role, in my position, that trust is not ever assumed, and it’s always earned and it’s always got to be nurtured. It constantly has to be nurtured. I think that’s the shift. When you haven’t had to do that, that’s going to be a huge learning curve to do. So the reweaving together, the trust and that real, true partnership. Whatever that means for people, that’s what’s going to need to look different.
PH: Yeah, I love the analogy for trust, as you know, like a marriage relationship with your relationship and Papa Ola Lokahi with these other organizations. You mentioned earlier, one of the critical aspects of data collection was the distribution of resources and seeing where there’s a need in that way. Do you see going forward and especially as it relates to health, concrete ways that Native Hawaiians can be better equipped through the resources maybe that were brought to light or the need for resources through this data collection? Do you see that data collection kind of helping equip Native Hawaiians health wise in the future?
SD: Yeah, I think one of the things that we really have looked at is I think a couple of things in this perfect storm. Senator Brian Schatz is now the chair of the Senate Committee on Indian Affairs and Appropriations. And Representative Case is on appropriation. There’s some pieces that add to opportunities. For Native Hawaiian health in particular, and I know housing and education got moneys in too, $20 million was put in for Native Hawaiian Health. What we recognized is that 20 million is a gift, with, but let me just say it’s a gift if I have to spin it positive. What that means is I can take that, and I can create the mechanisms so that I can show the value of that 20 million. The 20 million if I push it to community, if I develop trusted community, Native Hawaiian partners, all of these other things. If I build an opportunity to evaluate the value of those dollars, then it will help set up so that we can get more dollars into our Native Hawaiian Health Care Improvement Act. If we get more dollars there, then we can establish those pieces that we are looking at now with this side dollars to create long term sustainability.
Because one of the challenges is people always tell me, like, “Well, you guys got this money for 30 years. What have you done with it?” Well, what people don’t know is probably up until about six years ago, we were only getting between 9 and 14 million a year. And that went to five different Native Hawaiian health care systems, that went to our scholarship, all of these things. So when you look at people getting maybe a million dollars, what is that going to do? Really, when you talk about resources. So if we can use this money to demonstrate or build that model of engagement, then we can show the value of investing in Native Hawaiian health. And then what we can do is we have our tier one, which is our Native Hawaiian health care systems. We also then can create a cadre of community based organizations that can go deeper into communities, that can create partnerships with the systems, with other entities, and provide that opportunities to community. So these trusted community partners aren’t going and going after the little 20,000, 50,000 here and there, that they can get funding to support core services. That is where some of those changes are.
So I think where data is important is we’ve shown that COVID had impacts on Native Hawaiian numbers. We have more challenges with chronic conditions. We had challenges with the rollout of the vaccination, even though we were an identified priority group. They did not prioritize us. But that data helped Senator Schatz push for money to go into our native communities. So now we’re going to use that to really demonstrate and show what that 20 million can do. So it’s taking this situation and making it into an opportunity. That’s really what we’re looking at.
PH: Yeah. Thank you. And you’ve already talked about some of the positive outcomes that have come as a result of COVID-19, especially in improving resources to Hawaiians. Were there any other positive outcomes that you observed specifically within the community? I guess I’m not talking about external in terms of what is provided to meet the needs of Hawaiians, but kind of one kanaka to another in the Native Hawaiian community the outcomes of that?
SD: I think people have started to. . . . Not that they weren’t talking about some of the difficult topics. I think that was more common. But I think to be more open about the challenges with mental health, to be more open around some of the the challenges Hawaiians face in being Hawaiian. Just the the struggles of living in Hawaiʻi, raising your family. What does that mean? I think not that it wasn’t talked about before, but I think there was more voices that weren’t really the usual suspects or from communities that maybe we didn’t think would be as vocal or feel as impacted. So I think those were some of the positives. And we’ve heard stories about where communities came together, and they rallied, and they did because they had to. So I think that is just common place for our communities. But I think having the ability to talk about it, like what does that mean moving forward? What do we do different? I think we saw Hawaiians stand up to talk about economic diversity and better resource management. And not just stand up to be vocal in that activism way, but actually provide some potential solutions. I think that’s the other thing is Hawaiians we’re starting to talk about what does that mean? We cannot just be protesting, but what do we do different? And I think those are the different pieces that we’re starting to see is those conversations about what’s the next step? What’s a solution versus just, ok, we’re going to grumble about this.
PH: As we wrap up here, I want to briefly ask you some questions about your personal life. Were there any ways that COVID-19 affected or changed your family’s day to day lifestyle or kind of how you saw family and community as well?
SD: Yes, I think so. f
The fact that we could still put food on the table. From our house, once a month when the the Filipino Community Center had their food distribution, we saw how long the line went and the cars and really being appreciative that we didn’t need to do that even though our neighbors had to. We may not have been impacted those way, but we were because that made me feel kind of guilty that I can still afford to go get groceries and others couldn’t.
My husband taught at the college, so I think for him adjusting to that new teaching modality of online and asynchronous or synchronous, whatever that is, you know, those whole pieces. But on the flip side benefit, my husband was able to finish his PhD during COVID because he had the time. The requirements of what he needed to do were lessened because he was able to pivot very easily to an online teaching. But also my husband works part time at United Airlines, and they furloughed the folks. So he had that time to finish his Ph.D. So that was, I think, very positive for our family for him to be able to finish that. So I think in that way, yes, I did.
My dad, who is 74, lives with us. So I think to see him have less activity outside of the house was a reality. He wasn’t going down to meet his friends at Starbucks for their morning coffee or going to his water aerobics class. He was now home. So watching him have less physical activity was also right in front of us too. I think we were able to cope pretty well considering. But again, I think we had space to kind of take a break from each other too.
PH: Yeah, thank you. One final wrap up question I like to ask all of our interview narrators, and there’s really no one way to answer this question. But just reflecting on this past year, is there anything that you would have done differently either in your personal life or also in your current role at Papa Ola Lokahi?
SD: Probably not.
PH: Yeah. That’s ok too.
SD: I think, you know, would I have pushed a stronger voice on certain areas? Maybe. But I don’t think the outcome would have been different. So I think, no. I think I did well, considering.
PH: Yeah, you definitely did a lot from just talking with you today I can see that. In closing, Sheri, is there anything else that you’d like to add or any final thoughts that you’d like to leave with?
SD: No, I just really appreciate you asking the questions and giving me this opportunity.
PH: Thank you. It’s a pleasure. Well, I guess that concludes our interview. Thank you for your time today. I’ll go ahead and stop the recording.
SD: Thanks, Pono.