Ka Wai Ola - Office of Hawaiian Affairs, Volume 11, Number 4, 1 April 1994 — Using culture to rehabilitate native Hawaiian prisoners [ARTICLE+ILLUSTRATION]

Using culture to rehabilitate native Hawaiian prisoners

Former religious program manager for prisons supports using traditional values and cutoms to reform offenders

Interview by Patrick Johnston T he Reverend Tom Van Culin is a Hawaiian Episcopal priest and vicar at St. Matthew' s Episcopal church in Waimānalo. From October, 1990 to October 1993 he served as the religious program manager and chief ehaplain for the state Department of Public Safety, developing rehabilitation programs for prisoners of all religions but focusing on native Hawaiian offenders. Before joining DPS he worked for the California prison system in Vacaville, California. KWO: You have spent a lot of time on the Mainland but you are a Hawai'i native. Is that coirect? Van Culin: Yes. I was born in Kapi'olani Maternity Hospital, was raised in Waikikī and am a loeal high school graduate. I had a business career for many years on the Mainland and eame home with Northwest Airlines in the late 1960s as Hawai'i sales manger. But my work with the church was very important to me and I was able to go to seminary in 1986 at the Church Divinity School in the Pacific where I obtained my Masters of Divinity degree. KWO: So your work with the church is fairly recent?? » - -

Van Culin: In a sense, although for me it's been many years in that joumey. The eulminaūon is recent but the joumey has been long and extensive. I was raised, if you will, at St. Andrew's Cathedral. This was my home church. This is where I grew up. KWO: Why did you start working with the prisons in Hawai'i? Van Culin: A friend of mine handed me a flyer that had been circulated by the Hawai'i Council of Churches about the position that was opening up at the Department of Public Safety. She said that because of my background in the prison system in Califomia I might be interested. I did some checking on the position and concluded that it was not for me. Two or three weeks later she eame back to me and said, 'I don't know why you think God brought you home but I think God brought you home for this position. And you really need to explore it with that kind of sense.' And so I did. KWO: How did you get involved in the prisons in California? Van Culin: In seminary there is a program called elinieal pastoral education and there are many opportunities in whieh you ean do different types of study. In my particular instance the door that opened was the door to the prison system in Califomia working in

Vacavilie. 1 talked to some tnends of mine in Hawai'i who are priests at the Episcopal church and they said I should be doing my work in a prison setting. Because of the large presence of minority people in the prisons, being able to work in that kind of setting, they felt, would be very beneficial because of what it would mean for those of us ffom Hawai'i. Not in terms of the prison but in terms of the racial mix of the populahon and the tensions that exist. ... KWO: What do you think are some of the root causes of the high incarceration rate among native Hawaiians? Van Culin: When I eame to Hawai'i, I was concemed about the fact that our Hawaiian eommunity was over-represented in the prisons and I started to try to find out why. ... I discovered that before contact our community had a fully developed and mature eultural value system, a fully developed and mature spiritual value system, and a fully developed and mature social stmcture and those three elements functioned together in our community. With the arrival of Westemers, a different cultural system, a different value system and a different social value system confronted what was already here. ... Many within our Hawaiian community were able to assimilate into this new structure and fit in comfortably in terms of the Hawaiian traditions as well as the new traditions that were now present. But not everybody was. ... With the overthrow, the symbol of the social structure and the symbol of our unity was gone. And for many of our people who had not been able to assimilate, they felt somehow left out. The years following the overthrow were terri-

ble. And we have a iarge percentage of our population who have been outside this new sociaI stmcture. Most of the people who are in prison of Hawaiian ancestry are part of this group that is not in harmony with what's going on. ... If what I have stated is right in terms of the dislocation of our people, then one of the issues for our people is values, our cultural values and our spiritual values. Many of our people no longer know what our values are. It

would be important and very helpful for our people that are incarcerated to have an opportunity to leam these values. I met with some kahu and some lay people in the Hawaiian eommunity and they said, 'You're right on, that's precisely what our people need. But we need it throughout our whole community.' And I said, 'I hear you' but my responsibility was in the jails and that was where 1 want help in trying to put this together. So part of what I did was to go through this evalua-

tion process and ascertain what role cultural values and spiritual values played in our community life before contact and what could be done to try to bring those back to focus for people who are incarcerated as a way to help them realign their lives. My conviction is if our people live by our cultural values and by our spiritual values then they will not do things that

get us in prison. KWO: Is there a conflict between Christian values and Hawaiian values? Van Culin: I don't see a conflict. And I eome as a Christian who is Hawaiian. And I could put it the other way, I am a Hawaiian who is Christian. I can't separate the two. I am a Christian who is made up of Hawaiian and Caucasian backgrounds. To do otherwise is to split myself in two. That's what our people were expected to do. In my mother's generation the kūpuna would eall pre-Christian contact pagan. That's what the missionaries did. Well I look around and I see some of the writings of people in the early years of contact and God was already here. They describe the beauty, the quality of weleome, and the genuineness of the people. The difficulty is that the missionaries didn't eome and try to seek and identify and relate to the god who was already here in ways that the two could be at peaee with another. ... My focus is on the Hawaiian values, cultural values and spiritual values because I think that's what our people will identify with first. You move from that to how these values relate to universal values. ... Part of how this comes together for me is looking at the life of Jesus. Jesus wasn't a Christian, Jesus was a Jew, and Jesus understood his community, he under-

stooa nts cutturat vaiues as a Jew and it was out of that he was able to move into a different area. And I think it's the same thing for our own people. If we understand our own people, our cultural and spiritual values as Hawaiians then look at how we relate to the world beyond ourselves, I think we'll be moving on towards health and wholeness.

KWO: You've brought Jesus into the picture ... Van Culin: Only for myself. I don't try to impose that on Hawaiians in the prison system. When I have the opportunity, I make that comparison that I just did in terms of cultural values and Jesus. KWO: When you go to the prisons do you want to introduce or reintroduce Christian values? Van Culin: No, only Hawaiian cultural and spiritual values. KWO: So you don't actually bring Christianity in to the prisons

Van Culin: First of all, it is not me going back into the prisons to do that. Because of the role I had, I needed to develop other volunteers. What we integrated into the system is a kūpuna program at Hālawa Correctional Facility and at the Women's Community Correctional facility in Kailua. Through the kūpuna program and through chaplains of Hawaiian ancestry we're implementing a program to bring Hawaiian cultural values, Hawaiian spiritual values to those of Hawaiian ancestry and others who wanted to explore that aspect of a journey in the jail system. KWO: How do these prisoners react to your program?

Van Culin: Very positively. Lots of touching people at levels I hadn't realized were there. ... Things that we do without thinking, when we realize that they are a part of values or a part of our cultural and spiritual history, it takes on a different importance, a continued on page 12

The Reverend Tom Van Culin

Hawaiian prisoners share a bowl of poi in this turn-of-the-century photo. . Hawai'i State Archives

Van Culin

from page 11 different role. It's part of our eonsciousness. And that is what this is all about. It's about people eoming to a consciousness about who they are. ... KWO: When you look at incarceration rates for Orientals in Hawai'i, they are very low relative to their numbers in the populahon and mueh lower than those of Hawaiians. Is this all part of the same problem of culture and eom- 1 munity?

Van Culin: Yes, I believe it is. Or the impact of this reality is illustrated by what you just said. Part of it for our people is this being dislodged. ... People can't understand until you say it what a tremendous impact the loss of our " language has been to our people. It's as though we were told tomorrow moming we could no longer speak English. We had to speak another language. What kind of impact would that have on you emotionally, mentally, and spiritually? I've had people eome up to me who are ffom other eommunities and say 'Tom, I had no idea.' People just don't understand what happened to Hawaiians in terms of this total disruption of our life. Now when I talk about this I also recognize that people are in prison because they have done something wrong. Some people have done

things that are terribly wrong. I'm not saying that their sentences were wrong. ... KWO: Some of the problem I see as being inherited. For a person bom, say, 20 years ago the damage has been done. His life has been disrupted because previous generations have been dismpted.

Van Culin: Let me just work with what you've just said. First of all, we are just 100 years away from the overthrow. That footprint of

We have a serious drug and aleohol problem in the Hawaiian community. We need to confront it, deal with it.

our Hawaiianness is still right there. So a person who was born 20 years ago of Hawaiian ancestry is still to this day impacted by what has gone on. For example, he is impacted by the kinds of words that are used to describe Hawaiians. I sat in a class maybe 15 years ago and the teacher said 'Let's look at the words that are used to affect our image of people.' We looked at words for Japanese-Americans, Koreans, Caucasians, and Hawaiians. And we looked at words I had heard before, attitudes that I had heard expressed by teachers, by business

people. ... but I just felt cmshed by what was being put up because there were all the negative references to Hawaiians. And I realized that I was the only Hawaiian in the room and that this is the kind of stuff that goes on all the time for our people. ... KWO: In terms of rehabilitation and taking responsibility for your actions, do you support building more prisons or more rehabilitation? Van Culin: Well, I understand what's happening in Hawai'i with regard to the prison population expIosion. I would like us to look at some other techniques and other methods rather than build more prisons. I would seek to establish some facihty based on a Hawaiian context and geared to a Hawaiian way of educating, sharing, leaming, and help habilitate as well as rehabilitate. We have a serious drug and aleohol problem in our state. We have a serious dmg and aleohol problem in the Hawaiian community. We need to confront it, deal with it. We need to help people overcome dmg addiction and alcoholism and do it quickly before we lose any more ground. The same applies to anger management and family violenee. You don't treat 'ohana in a violent way. It's not consistent with the understanding of 'ohana to be violent with one another, at least as I understand it.