 |
|---|
 |
John Dudoit - Photo: Liza Simon |
LOCKED UP
Nurturing Fathers takes an 'ohana approach
As a counselor for the Nurturing Fathers of Hawai'i, John Dudoit guides incarcerated men through the same program that he credits for helping him after he abandoned his family, abused drugs for decades and was finally sentenced to two years in prison on drug-related charges. “Men like me have to learn to give back to the family not just to take,” said Dudoit.
The program teaches fathers in prison to heal emotional damage inflicted on them by their own fathers. For Dudoit, this meant coming to terms with a dad who was abusive and alcoholic. “I look back and wonder sometimes how come I didn't recognize the chaos when everyone started to fight and beat up and next day it was, 'Oh, sorry bruddah! Let's go buy another six-pack, so we can drink again, so we can fight again, so we can make up again.' What a cycle!”
Family therapy experts agree that the dad-generated domestic abuse cycle cuts across all ethnicities. But Dudoit believes that being the product of an abusive Native Hawaiian home brought him a double whammy of shame: his father made him feel worthless, and as he grew into manhood during the 1970s, struggling to survive in an economy that was marginalizing kanaka made him feel even worse. “Not that I didn't have opportunity,” he said, explaining that he had become a professional draftsman and bought his own home in Makiki just years out of high school. But deep inside he felt he was a bad guy and set out to prove it by getting involved with drug trade.
“So the first time I got busted and got released, I went right back to my parent's home and ripped out my face from our only family portrait to show I was so bad, I couldn't possibly belong to them,” he said, pausing to choke back tears at the memory of his rage turned inward. He eventually divorced his wife and had little to do with his four children.
In prison, a combination of drug treatment and “moments of truth with God” led him to regret his severing of family ties. Then while taking college sociology courses through a prison release program, he hooked up with social worker-professors Tom and Barbara Naki of the Institute for Family Enrichment. TIFFE, as it is known, had adopted the clinically proven approach to successfully reuniting families by empowering men like Dudoit to trade in abusiveness for nurturance with mentorship from other dads. Because of the makeup of the local inmate population, TIFFE “Hawaiianized” the program with familiar cultural symbols such as kalo planting and canoe voyaging to teach cooperation, praise and encouragement as key to household harmony.
Like many incarcerated fathers, Dudoit found the program difficult at first because it involves forgiving the unforgivable. A challenging moment came when he was asked him to say some positive things about his own dad. But he did it. Gradually, he started forgiving himself.
Because the program treats every family as a holistic system, Dudoit was eventually required to sit down with his ex-wife and his by-then grown-up children to put together a so-called safety plan stating how they would all cope with the hurt of the past, if they resumed contact.
Asked how well the plan has worked, he says with a smile, it's not so much a plan – as it is a miracle. On Valentine's Day two years ago, he remarried his ex-wife. Together, they are now raising two grandsons. “Not only am I a counselor now, I apply the tools (from the program). Just to be a dad who comes home every day and says, 'Hey son, how was your day?' Just listening to your children is so important.' ”
For information, go to www.tiffe.org.
Native Spirituality
embraced by pa'ahao
In the mid 1990s, the Hawai'i Department of Public Safety began shipping out Hawaiian inmates to corrections facilities from Arizona to Mississippi on the U.S. continent to alleviate overcrowded local prisons, but there was an unintended result: “We suffered racist treatment from some guards who had never seen an ocean. Some of us were punished for flashing their shaka or having (traditional) tattoos and having long hair. They thought everything we did was part of some gang activity,” recalled Kaleihau Kamau'u, who was locked up in a series of mainland corrections facilities for a drug-related robbery charge.
Kamau'u saw the need to organize the nonprofit Hui Kākou Pa'ahao. The group won court settlement enabling them to honor Lono, the Hawaiian god of peace and fertility by holding the annual makahiki festival in several corporate-run federal prisons on the continent. The 2005 settlement also protected the Constitutional right of Native Hawaiians to practice their indigenous religion in all US prisons.
It's been a victory for both Hawaiian culture and Hawaiian spirituality, which for Kamau'u are inseparable. “I really think we Hawaiians could solve our high rate of our incarceration and recidivism if we had a place to have a pu'uhonua. This is would be a place where we could work on fixing the broken identity that got so many of us here in prison to begin with,” he said.
Kamau'u knows the road to achieving his dream is not easy. Right now, he's has been ordered back to prison for violating conditions of his probation. Meanwhile, he said that in spite of the court order, corrections staff here and on the US Continent are often culturally insensitive to Native Hawaiian religion and sometimes take steps like prohibiting pa'ahao from gathering for an oli. They are given a chance to attend an indigenous spirituality program from Aotearoa, known as Na Maka Walu. “But this is classified as an educational program, so our right to participate is classified as a privilege that can be revoked without any explanation by prison staff,” he said.
Someone else in his situation might find bitter irony in having to fight to bring a peace-making activity into prison on its home turf, but Kamau'u is perhaps more grounded than most in his cultural roots. His great-aunt is venerated kumu 'Iolani Luahine. The in-prison curriculum he has developed spans her teachings of hula, oli, plus studies in 'olēlo and Hawaiian values.
He also knows what it is to be estranged from one's own roots. Growing up in the 1960s before the Hawaiian Renaissance, he felt inferior about his Hawaiianess, but now he takes pride in it and even in his incarcerated life. “Reintegration begins the moment you walk in to prison. This means you take full responsibility for what you've done and what you will do to rebuild your connections with rich and ancient culture that is also involved right now in nation-building.” Because Native Hawaiian spirituality is not codified like organized religion, practitioners are the best source of further information.
 |
|---|