Ka Wai Ola - Office of Hawaiian Affairs, Volume 11, Number 6, 1 June 1994 — Queen's chairman makes Hawaiian health a priority [ARTICLE+ILLUSTRATION]

Queen's chairman makes Hawaiian health a priority

Interview bv Patrick Johnston Kenny Brown is the Chairman of the Board of the Queen's Meāieal System. A partHawaiian businessman anā architect, Brown is active throughout the Hawaiian eommunity, serving on the boards of several agencies. He has played an important role in refocusing Queen's attention on the health needs of native Hawaiians in recent years.

KWO: You were born in Hawai'i, have lived here virtually all of your life, you have some Hawaiian ancestry, and you have heen involved in a huge variety of different activities in the islands. What do you see as your role in Hawaiian society? Brown: First of all, my great grandfather was John 'Ī'ī, who, at the age of around 10 years old, was given to the court of Kamehameha I and spent his life in service to the court. One of the things he did before being delivered to the court was to ask his mother and father why they were doing this to him, especially after his elder brother, who they also gave to the court, was executed

for violating a kapu. They answered that it was his duty and their duty to be of service to the court. He spent his life in service to the Kamehamehas whieh, I believe, was actually service to the people. I rediscovered him as I was looking at my life a few decades ago and I attribute to him my desire to be of service to the eommunity. I guess it's something genetic. The Maoris say, "I am here on the shoulders of my ancestors." When I went down to New Zealand for the first time I was impressed by the fact that they have a great respect for knowledge of genealogy. The imperatives of your ancestors are handed down from them to you, and you're supposed to hand them down to your descendants. So I think I'm just in a line of people who have served the people. KWO: that your reason for

getting involved with the Queen's Medical System? Brown: Probably it was. But I think a sage onee said that as you live your life it appears to not have mueh pattern. But when you look back at it with maturity a pattern does appear. I think that some of the things that I have gotten involved in have shown a pattern of service. I was anxious to get involved in things just to help.

KWO: When did you get involved with Queen's? Brown: 25 years ago. It was in the family. My father was on the board. My grandmother was founder of what is now the Queen's Auxiliary. KWO: What do you think is the role of the Queen's Health System with regard to native Hawaiians? Brown: The Queen's Health System was founded by Queen Emma and Kamehameha IV who saw their people go from 300,000 or more down to 60,000 in their lifetimes. They saw the wasting of their people because they had no antibodies to protect them from diseases that were coming in from overseas. And

they said, "We must ltring Westem technologies and treatments to try and stop the dying." The mission of Queen's Hospital when it was formed was to take care of and preserve the heakh of the Hawaiian people and therefore to preserve the race. They founded the hospital and brought in Western-style doctors and medicines but they had a heek of a time in the beginning persuading the Hawaiian folks to

eome into the hospital. ... They realized the ancient and the modern had to be combined for the benefit of people who had been impacted by Western civilization. The mission of Queen's today has to do with the well-being of all people in Hawai'i with particular emphasis on the Hawaiian people. The Hawaiian people are now a multi-genetic mix. There are very few pure Hawaiians left. Anyone with Hawaiian blood is a eoneem of the Queen's Health System. Hawaiians and part

Hawaiians as a group on average have the lowest indicators of health and wellness. So the major challenge I think for an outfit like Queen's is to find the reasons for this and make strong efforts to change things. The dream is to have the Hawaiian people equal to or above the health indicators of the whole state of Hawai'i. When you look at things you ftnd that health indicators have a lot to do with economics, a lot

with stable social structures. There are not many people out there who know how to improve those things. A lot of people pay lip service to it. Our expertise is in curing broken stuff, and medieine. The Queen would say, "Yes that's OK, you're doing a good job with that, but why don't you start mitigating those factors that are inhibiting the health and wellness of the Hawaiians as well as other folks in the state?" And that's a new idea. ... KWO: Has Queen's been doing anything directly with the Hawaiian community to deal with this problem? Brown: We support the Moloka'i Hospital and various Hawaiian agencies. But again just supporting hospitals is not enough. We're dedicated to helping the sick. I say our long term mission is to be more dedicated to preventing people from getting sick. KWO: Do you have any ideas on how to do this?

Brown: We're using a technique that's now being used around the world, particularly in the USA, that talks about "healthy eommunities," defining health broadly enough so that it includes things such as violence, unemployment, the high cost of living, social unrest, all that stuff. We would like to convene people dealing with health in this way and try to figure out how to attack the problem. ... 1 believe that the institutions of our society aren't working anymore. I think society works in many ways in spite of the laws, and the institutions. There is something deep and basic about people. This community (Hawai'i) works pretty well in many cases in spite of the people who make laws. What we want to do is find out what basic human characteristics make everything work and somehow or other use them to start working on a specifie problem. There are a lot of people in the government who worry

about the high cost of housing, the cost of living, but their worries are all sort of compartmentalized in one discipline. We figure if we ean somehow convene people with one motive to build a healthier community we might find ways of devising new approaches to the problem. ... I'm always impressed by how a city like Honolulu works. Nobody goes rampaging around, the elevators all work, people piek up the garbage, the sanitation is not bad, and it's not because of all the laws we have, it is because people have a basic goodness that makes it work. If everyone here woke up one morning and said "I ain't gonna do my job" the plaee would fall apart. You could make all the laws in the world and they

wouldn't work. There is something that motivates people, a goodness. KWO: A very complex issue. What is it that holds societies together? Brown: It is a strength, I believe. KWO: And it is connected to health because the health of individuals in strong societies and communities will be better than those in weak ones.

Brown: Exactly. There is a group on the Mainland that is trying to combat violence in the cities. Violence on the streets has to do with self-esteem: you're tough and I'm tough. If we have a eonfrontation one of us has to win and the other one can't go away so we have to slug it out. That's because of "self-esteem." If you ehieken out, run away, then you are no good. So these people on the Mainland are now trying to start a new way of looking at it. They are trying to show that there is nothing wrong with saying, "No, 1 don't want to fight." You change the whole attitude and values of that particular society so the one who says, "No I don't want to fight you" may be venerated more than the other.

The reason those kids act and talk the way they do is because of self-esteem. If you don't have a formal society or community or family to give you self-esteem then you've got to make it out of these gangs and the gang is going to resort to violence. I have a theory on eommunieation. ... If I really wanted to get you to do something I could hit you over the head. Or I could play some beautiful music for you or have a lovely woman eome to

you. In both cases you would probably do what I ask. There is strong communication both in violence and love and many of us take over the violent part because it is easier. But love is just as strong a form of communication. So how do we get ourselves to invoke the love and not the violenee. ... We need that kind of eommunication (love) but I have not yet resolved why both ends of the spectrum are equally effective. I don't know. KWO: A battle of good versus evil, I guess. Brown: I think you've got to learn to accept both and know them both. ... You can't reject evil and say I'm perfect because you know you have darkness in you. I think the trouble with a lot of us is that we pretend that we're all good. Sometimes we should accept the evil in us. ... God created the devil.

KWO: To eome back to the topic of Queen' s, has there been a deliberate change in policy on the part of Queen' s recently with regard to native Hawaiians and their health? Brown: Yes there has. There was a time, and I don't want to sound derogatory at all to those who eame before me, after the founding of Queen's when there was a strong turning towards Western stuff. They were enchanted by the power of Westem science and for a long time Queen's was on the forefront of Western science, morals, and values. I am the first part-Hawaiian to become chairman since Kalākaua. There's continued on page 21

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nothing wrong with the people who ran the institution in the past. They were benevolent and benign. They felt they knew what was best for everybody. There was a theory a hundred years ago that there was a hierarchy of races. A major eonelusion of a scientiftc organization in France was that this hierarchy had to do with intelligence. They were measuring different people's skulls and they found out the haole ones had bigger skulls. ... This was accepted

dogma about 70 or 80 years ago. Hawaiian folks and other had to be treated well, and caringly and everything, but they were somehow not quite able to take care of themselves. It was a benign Christian thing. But as the years went by that whole thesis fell apart. But the institutions that were formed under that misapprehension of hierarchy continued to operate. One of the things that we have been doing more overtly is turning thc institutions of Queen's into something that is based on the

nobi!ity of Hawaiians, the nobi!ity of their heritage. their religion. ... KWO: Do you think Hawaiian values ean play a part in meāieal care for all people in Hawai'i? : Brown: Yes, very mueh so. We've had a program in the past five years in whieh we reawakened among all the people in the Queen's Medical Center the importance of

Queen Emma, to instill in them the healing and Hawaiian values that are the heart of the whole operation. We've been told by outside consultants that we are very lucky because we have a truly inspiring legacy that people ean use to do a better job every day. ... We try to institutionalize that sense of the Queen's mission. And it works. Our biggest challenge as we get bigger and more complex is to keep on invoking the strength of what the Queen would want. So Hawaiian values are vital. i / ■ /