The David Malo Award recipient for 2017 is Dr. Claire Hughes. A longtime champion for Native Hawaiian health care needs and advocate of the traditional Hawaiian diet, Dr. Claire Hughes was featured on 5/3/11’s Long Story Short with Leslie Wilcox and the following are exerpts from the transcript of the broadcast.
Claire Ku’uleilani Hughes, who has spent more than three decades raising public awareness of Hawaiian health needs, became the first Native Hawaiian registered dietitian in 1959 and became the chief of the nutrition branch for the State Department of Health. She was named one of 2011’s Living Treasures of Hawaii by the Honpa Hongwanji Mission of Hawaii in recognition of her groundbreaking work in drawing attention to the benefits of returning to a more traditional Hawaiian diet and for her advocacy for health programs on behalf of the Hawaiian community.
Dr. Claire Hughes, the State of Hawaii’s first registered dietician of Hawaiian ancestry and awarded the honor by the Honpa Hongwanji Mission of Hawaii. But Dr. Hughes didn’t always feel valued. In fact, there were many times she felt dismissed. That’s one of the reasons for her lifelong pursuit of education, which included earning a Ph.D. Her tremendous dedication and strong will have helped her advance Native Hawaiian health care initiatives, including research showing the benefits of a traditional Native Hawaiian diet. Claire Hughes’s “small kid time” was spent on a sugar plantation. Growing up in the late 1930s, she was among the thousands living in various plantation camp communities that were generally segregated along ethnic lines. At Kekaha Sugar on Kauai, Claire and her parents and two siblings lived in Haole Camp, with its superior accommodations.
Dr. Huges says, “We were the only Hawaiian family that lived in Haole Camp. And Haole Camp is where all the managerial staff are. So my father started out as the engineer on that company plantation, and then he moved to personnel director. So we lived in Haole Camp. And at the time, I wasn’t really aware that I should be on edge, because I was the only Hawaiian. And it wasn’t too obvious to us, ‘cause there were a couple other graduates from Punahou School, which is the school my father graduated from. And so we were quite at home. We had friends that lived maybe a block and a half away that were Hawaiian, so we were not alienated totally from people who were Hawaiian. And I really had no idea that Haole Camp was that special until I was way into adulthood, and met a young lady who lived on a plantation. And when I disclosed that I lived in Haole Camp, she was so impressed.
Okay. Well, we had homes that were ranch style, one level. They were on about an acre of property. The back yard went back forever. My mother had uh, a banana tree farm, and pets back there, ducks and all kinds of things. But down in Japanese Camp, the homes were much closer. And things were not as pretty. We had gardeners that helped us do the yard work and then Filipino Camp was just about like Japanese Camp. But there were definite camp demarcations, and you could tell by the look of the camps, that Japanese Camp had a lot of shoji door type things. And so Portuguese Camp was where there was a big outside oven. And it was right next to the school, and on certain days, all of the Portuguese ladies brought their bread out and cooked it in this big oven. And as a kid, I can remember thinking, Ooh, the smells were so good.
We had the latest of things. We had a washing machine, number one. And uh, everybody was outfitted with that. And then, we had a crank phone, party line. And so, there was just a box on the wall with a speaker that came out, and an earpiece you picked up. And when you wanted to call somebody, you picked up the receiver, and you cranked the phone. And our phone was one long, and two short. So you cranked one, two, three, if you wanted to call home. And then, if you wanted to call anybody else, my mother would say, Auntie Esther is three shorts and one long. So we go, one, two, three, and then crank one more time around. In those days, if you picked up on the ring, nobody knew, and you could listen to the whole thing if you wanted to. Children didn’t get to use the phone a lot. It was usually to deliver a message. There were many things we were not allowed to do, and we listened.
Well, my mother was the strictest mother. And my father was kind of not so strict. And so, we knew we could work my dad for things, and that my mother was very difficult. I ran away from her one day. Because I didn’t want to do something, I ran away. I mean, physically ran. And I ran into the neighbor’s yard, and she called us. [CHUCKLE] All the kids over there were, Catch Claire. And they caught me, and I got a … whipping with a Panax hedge
Well, I always, lolo, thought the skinny ones were the better ones. So I’d try and get a small skinny one. Well, those were more pliable, and we were stung, yeah? When they hit you, go whack. So I learned very quickly, get the big brittle one, because it might break.”
Dr. Claire Hughes’s family eventually moved to Oahu where she attended Kamehameha School. She says her career path involved a bit of serendipity. When her mother pressed about her career plan, she blurted out the first thing that came to mind, because she’d just read an article that mentioned it: dietitian. Once committed, she stuck to that off-the-top-of-her-head choice. Fighting homesickness and struggling though her courses at Oregon State University, she earned a Bachelor’s degree in Science. On her return to the islands she couldn’t find a job in the dietetics field and settled on work in school food services. In the late 1960s she found a foothold in State government which became a career of more than 30 years at the Department of Health. She started out a Clinical Dietician and Public Health Nutritionist. While working and raising two children, Claire Hughes studied for and received her Master’s of Science in Public Health Nutrition. She saw education as an equalizer in an imperfect world.
In the late 1980s Dr. Claire Hughes collaborated with medical Doctors Emmett Aluli and Kekuni Blaisdell on what was to be groundbreaking work, establishing the value of returning to a traditional Hawaiian diet to restore and maintain health.
They had done in 1985 a cardiovascular study, cardiovascular disease study. And they looked for risk factors, and they found many. And they found many untreated, and previously undiagnosed problems. So, both doctors were trying to devise some kind of a approach to reducing those risk factors. And they were looking for a crosscutting issue. What can we take that would lower the risk for hypertension high cholesterol, overweight, and all of these things. Well, what’s a crosscutting issue? Eating. So they decided, diet. Okay, diet. We studied a lot of Kawena Pukui’s work with the Handys. They were two professors. Kawena Pukui worked with them to identify all of the plants, and then to describe how they were used, and describe the diets usually for children and for pregnant women, and for adults. And so, when I worked with both doctors, we decided that, Okay, this is what the diet was gonna be, we’re gonna include all of these foods. And on that diet, no one was allowed to lose weight. They wanted any blood change, blood fat and blood sugar, and all of those changes, they didn’t want it to come from the body losing weight and getting rid of those things.
They wanted to maintain the body weight, so any changes in the blood would show, what was being changed. What was changing was the food that was going in. So with the change in the food, would that be enough to lower blood cholesterol. That was the main emphasis. This diet program was one week adjusting, and then we went to a straight-on Hawaiian food only and traditional Hawaiian food. Well, for Hawaiians, of course, it is representing the god Kane, the taro plant. And he is the most primal force that we have in our belief system. That has a spiritual essence that surpasses any other food. We found out with the University studies that were done in the 40s, they found out that it is one of the easiest foods for babies to digest. There are B vitamins in it. There’s a little bit of calcium in it, more than potatoes have. And because Hawaiians ate such a large amount of poi, it actually amounted to something. The calcium amounted to something. If you ate the leaves of the taro, the luau, you’d have plenty calcium. Plenty iron. There’s a little bit of iron in the,taro corm as well. So it’s chock full of all kinds of minerals, as the—calcium and iron being two.
The calculations were seventy-five to seventy-eight percent plant food. So if you picture a clock, from the twelve all the way around to ten, on your plate would be full of sweet potato, taro, poi, all the greens in the world, limu, yams, whatever. And we had a few fruit, not many. And many were forbidden to women, like bananas, women couldn’t eat. So, three quarters of your plate would be full of vegetables and plant food. The twelve percent would be for protein. And with Hawaiian diet, it’s fish. And everybody says, Well, there’s pork. Well, pork was a really ritualistic food. It was saved for the big celebration, it was a ritual food. It was not really eaten every day.
And then the last little bit would be fat. Because the fat was not added. You didn’t put gravy, you didn’t put butter, you didn’t put oil, ‘cause there was no such thing.
So where did the fat come from? From the food itself. From inside the fish, inside the chicken. There was also chicken, and they ate birds too, and that’s why Hawaiians were not fat.The first Europeans described them as tall, lean, muscular, very agile, and very athletic. Yeah. We were taller than Captain Cook, who was about five-foot-two, or three.
Outside of her full-time job with the Department of Health, Dr. Claire Hughes helped secure federal funding for culturally-based health and nutrition programs. Her drive and dedication led to a comprehensive report on Hawaiian health care concerns. Dr. Hughes was selected to be a part of a panel called upon to testify before the U.S. Senate. The end-result was the Native Hawaiian Health Care Act of 1988.
