Listen To The Waves. How Do Pacific People Identify Culture With Health?

Paddle with Me
In this lesson we’ll be asking “How do people identify with their own culture?” Some of the resources in this lesson are specific to Native Hawaiians while others take a broader perspective. The resource booklet from the Medical Council includes a broader range of Pacific and Indigenous Peoples’ perspective. As you watch the two required videos in this lesson, think about these questions: What does it mean to be Hawaiian? What does “kuleana” mean? How is chanting and hula used in Native Hawaiian culture? What lessons can be learned from a society that lived thousands of years pre-Western/pre-European contact? How has Hawai‘i lost its cultural sustainability?

A Paddler’s Perspective
People who come from the islands and spend a lot of time in the ocean understand certain protocols, such as:

• Respect the ocean; never turn your back on the ocean
• Take care of the canoe – when it’s out of the water, never lean or sit on it.

Think about how powerful these values are…

Understanding how powerful traditional values can be in influencing culture is critical to understanding the culture itself. Building on your knowledge of other cultures’ values will help you see things through a different lens. For the purposes of this course, this new perspective will be from a Pacific lens. To do this, it takes constant attention to ourselves, our actions, our thoughts, our own biases. We all have our own values that have developed as a result of our own histories – our own stories. This affects how we SEE things. We can’t ignore that. Rather, we need to be cognizant of our own histories and how they influence us as human beings. We can’t erase them – just acknowledge them. Then, we can learn new ways to see, be, react, talk, move, help, and love. I know this may sound a little “heavy” for a college course. This type of learning is not easy and can feel abstract. Wow, Kumu, this stuff is a little out there! I get it. Hang in there with me and you’ll be fine.

You don’t need to totally understand all of this – it’s a journey. Enjoy the paddle!!