APHN ProgramCulture Of Health

Here in Kalihi, here at Hoʻoulu ʻĀina. Our community really cares about ‘āina. It cares about the connection between kanaka and ‘āina. So ‘o ka hā o ka ‘āina ke ola o ka po‘e is something we say all the time. That the health of the land and the breath of the people those are one thing. So here in Hawaiʻi we know the importance of the land, the importance of culture, the importance of connection to one another. That’s what makes health.

Healing the land and healing the people, that's the same thing. When you heal the land, you heal. When you heal yourself, the land is going to heal you can not have one sick and the other one healthy. They're connected.

KKV is founded on the concept of listening, that's our culture already as an organization but through this framework development we started to listen more deeply, taking these stories, we asked people: What are the stories of your health? When did you feel the most healthy and what we found is, across the board there are all of these elements of connection and when people feel connected, when people feel whole rather than isolated, when people feel heard like truly listened to, that was when they felt the health healthiest and so that's what our community sees as health. That's what our community advocates for when it comes to health.

Pilinahā is a connections framework. It's a health framework that focuses around four major connections: connection to others, connection to place, to ‘āina, connection to past and future so that's usually where culture comes in, and the last one is connection to yourself but not just yourself in general to your best self, do you know yourself?

Those four connections came to be, when we were listening to our community about health measures: What matters to you? What is important to you? What do you see as your healthy moment in your life. And through various coming together, and focus groups, and partnerships between Kokua Kalihi Valley and the Roots Program and Islander Institute with Josh and Andrew, there was a really great understanding, something born. The connection between Islander Institute and KKV was really exciting because the framework was born but the concept was an old concept. These are concepts that our grandparents understood. That to be healthy - it's about those connections, and so what we did was we listened to our community: to health practitioners, cultural practitioners, people who are good at economics, people who are activists, people who are, you know, just Joe Blow from down the road. We listen to all the different stories.

Our ancestors understood that moʻolelo is data. Story is data. Science comes from story, cosmology tracks environment, all of those things are related. Nowadays we kind of try to silo that out too. Data is seen as sort of quantitative, numbers-related, extractive, even, outcomes. Qualitative is this story, feel-good, you know, allegory and almost always dismissed kinds of data.

But our ways of seeing require both to come together. We need a really really smart, lab coat wearing, fill-in-the-box data trackers, to hold hands with the chanters, and the cosmology people and the people who understand story and the really good listeners are gonna stand right in the middle. They're gonna hear the stories from the community, they're gonna be listening from antiquity all the way forward because that is how we're gonna create abundance many generations forward. We don't want to throw out, oh like wind data, rain data, water measurement. In forestry, a lot of times these are really important. This helps us to understand what's happening in our environment especially as it's changing with such extreme rains. But that doesn't mean that the moʻolelo cannot support that. So we need to also have the moʻolelo because in the stories is where the values are. It doesn't matter if you have the number if it's not lining up with a value set that is going to truly create generational and generative abundance.