Transcript: Senator Daniel Ken Inouye

Senator Inouye’s mother was adopted by a Hawaiian family and was taught Hawaiian traditional medicine

[Lindberg:]: You know, Senator, we’re making an exhibition on Native American concepts of health and illness, so of course we’re very interested. Really, the idea started in visits to Hawai‘i. So I wonder, do you think that’s a good idea?
[Inouye:]: I think it’s an excellent idea, because I take it from a very personal standpoint. My mother was an orphan at the age of four. Her parents were immigrants working in a plantation from Hiroshima. And so here she was abandoned in the plantation village. A Hawaiian couple came by, and took her by hand and took her home.
[Lindberg:]: How nice.
[Inouye:]: So she lived with this Hawaiian family for over a year, and there she learned many of the special skills of Native Hawaiians. For example, until—from the time I was born to the time the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor on December 7, the only doctors I saw— one was for my tonsillectomy and the other one for my compound fracture of my elbow. Otherwise, it was all Native medicine. I’d get a sore throat. She’d say just a minute, and she’d go into the back, pluck something from a little shrub, and that was it. Never got sick.