Richard Kekuni Akana Blaisdell (March 11, 1925 – February 12, 2016), was professor emeritus of medicine at the University of Hawaii at Mānoa in Honolulu, and a longtime organizer in the Hawaiian Sovereignty Movement. Blaisdell was the co-founder of an organization of Hawaiian health professionals called, E Ola Mau in 1984. He was also the Founding Chair, of the Department of Medicine at the University of Hawaiʻi John A. Burns School of Medicine in 1966. He was the convener for the 1993 Kanaka Maoli People's Tribunal, which documented U.S. abuses throughout all major islands in great detail before an international panel of judges, and the primary organizer of Ka Pākaukau (literally, "the Table"), an ongoing forum for dialogue surrounding Kānaka Maoli sovereignty and Hawaiian independence. Early life Richard Kekuni Akana was born March 11, 1925 to Marguerite Nameleonalani Piltz and James Keli‘ikauahi Akana. His mother married William Kaha‘i Blaisdell in 1940. A Graduate of the Kamehameha School for Boys in 1942, and a classmate of former U.S. Senator Daniel K. Akaka during World War II, Blaisdell was awarded a BA cum laude from the University of Redlands in 1945 (Class Officer, Football Team), a classmate of Warren Christopher, Secretary of State for President Clinton, and an MD from the University of Chicago School of Medicine in 1948. Early medical career After an Osler medical internship at the Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore, Maryland in 1949, he served as a medical resident on the Tulane Medical Service of Charity Hospital in New Orleans, Louisiana. In 1950-1954, he was in the US Army Medical Corps, as an investigator at the Climatic Research Laboratory in Lawrence, Massachusetts. He served as a battalion surgeon in Korea and a medical officer (Internist, US Army 343 Army Hosp) in Koizumi, Japan and Taiwan. In 1954-1955, he became an instructor in pathology at Duke University Hospital in Durham, North Carolina. He then returned to the University of Chicago in 1955 to complete a fellowship in hematology (research on iron enzymes and preleukemia), and he was appointed to the faculty as instructor in 1957 and assistant professor of medicine in 1958. In 1959, he was appointed Chief of Hematology and Research Associate at the Atomic Bomb Casualty Commission in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Japan, where he did research on anemia, leukopenia, myelodysplasia in atomic bomb survivors, and adopted Mitsunori, a Japanese orphan. He returned to the University of Chicago