A call for respect and equality for indigenous scholarship in Hawaiian health

In the State of Hawai'i, there has been steady interest on the part of Western scholarly communities in studies of indigenous Hawaiian intellectual properties. There exists an academic desire to appropriate new fields of knowledge from Hawaiian sources. This pursuit of knowledge runs the risk of increasing the sense of cultural violation already felt by many indigenous populations. If conducted using the means of colonialist intellectualism common to the academy of the dominant culture, this quest for new information will likely contribute to a legacy of spiritual and cultural violation felt by the Hawaiian people. This effort will then likely lead to a further decline in feelings of cultural integrity on the part of native populations. This endeavor will then increase the basis for the psycho-spiritual malaise that underpins the negative health statistics evidenced in Native Hawaiian populations. If present day researchers are to gain greater insight into the lexicon of knowledge available from Native Hawaiians, they will have to employ methods that provide for indigenous scholars to serve as co-researchers in this quest. If Western scholars are to gain access to Native Hawaiian knowledge, such information will more likely come as a result of healing this social wound by developing a new relationship of respect for Native Hawaiian cosmology, epistemology, and pedagogy--one wherein all parties are accepted as co-equals in the scholarly process.