The University of Hawaii’s Center for Indigenous Innovation and Health Equity has received a $2 million award from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.

The money will support CIIHE’s five-year initiative to implement indigenous health innovations for Native Hawaiian and Pacific Islander communities.

“We’re trying to identify where these potential indigenous innovations are that have the potential to improve health and how we advance those,” said Aimee Grace, CIIHE co-principal investigator and UH Office of Strategic Health Initiatives director. “It’s a whole different framing of what is health and what makes healthy people.”

Kamuela Enos, CIIHE principal investigator and UH Office of Indigenous Knowledge and Innovation director, said the idea for CIIHE was born while he worked as a director at Ma‘o Farms. Through a partnership with John A. Burns School of Medicine researcher Alika Maunakea, they discovered that adults working on their farms were 50% to 60% less likely to develop type 2 diabetes, Enos said.

“It was the first time we had actually witnessed biomedical research that we felt was really not focused on telling the community how sick it was,” Enos said. “It was instead focused on a community organization to show them the impact of their work.”

The realization was a key motivator that led him to create CIIHE when he began working at UH’s Office of the Vice President for Research and Innovation, he said. It also helped him understand the value in positioning community-­based organizations as experts on such matters while co-producing research.

CIIHE’s initiative will be carried out in partnership with Kokua Kalihi Valley Family Health Services, and it has the potential to receive $8 million in additional funding over the next four years, according to a University of Hawaii news release. In addition to funding research, the award also will support community-­based efforts that increase NHPI patients’ exposure to traditional cultural practices like laau lapaau (plant medicine), lomilomi (massage), ai pono (healthy eating) and cultural birthing practices.

“The general idea beneath it all was that our ancestral practices were health interventions,” Enos said. “People we see who represent Indigenous-led innovation, they’re really good at taking their ancestral practices and applying them in contemporary places to solve contemporary issues.”

One of the benefits of working with KKV is that the center already incorporates many of the aforementioned practices within their programs, said Grace.

Throughout the five-year initiative, the hope is that the research generated will fuel further support for those who are already implementing indigenous health innovations to eventually practice them on a larger scale, Enos said.

Health and wellness at KKV is evaluated on Pilinaha, which Grace explained is a framework that outlines the four vital connections that people typically seek to feel whole and healthy in their lives. They include connection to place, community, past and future, and one’s better self, according to the KKV website.

Ideally, CIIHE eventually will become a permanent institution that supports community-based organizations in not only research, but also funding, policy mechanisms and more, Enos added.

“We want to make sure that we’re developing a practice with our core team to be able to deploy resources, to position our communities as experts and really to set our communities up to be able to receive this in ways that make sense to them and help participate in co-designing this process with us,” he said.

———

Linsey Dower covers ethnic and cultural affairs and is a corps member of Report for America, a national service organization that places journalists in local newsrooms to report on undercovered issues and communities.