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On a drizzly, gray day in May, the Huntsman Center on the University of Utah campus is jammed. Car parks are full, and crowds of people — toddling children, gray-haired grandparents, teenagers, all huddled under umbrellas — stream into the arena.
It’s Graduation Day for Salt Lake City’s West High School. As the graduates take the long walk across the stage, their families applaud with culturally appropriate enthusiasm: The small groups of middle-class WASPY types stand and clap.
But as the young Polynesian teens walk, their families — big groups of 15 to 20 — rush to the rail and pile ‘ulas over their graduates’ heads — ‘ulas made of flowers, paper, and money.
Some of the kids can barely see over the congratulatory ‘ulas stacked up to their noses, as they accept their diplomas while their extended families clap, cheer, and stamp their approval, an island of enthusiasm standing out in the huge facility among the more sedate applause.
It’s bound to stand out.
The merging of larger-than-life Polynesian culture into LDS Utah has always been tough, even though the two cultures have lived together in the Utah desert for more than a century.
“Pacific Islanders have been in Utah longer than my Italian, Irish and Serbian relatives have been in the United States,” says University of Utah’s American West Center Director, Matt Basso.
“And they’ve been in Utah in an unbroken chain, which is absolutely a remarkable story.”
In 1845, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints sent its first missionaries to the South Pacific island of Tahiti. The Mormons weren’t alone. It was a period of zealous Christian proselytising in the region.
But the LDS missionaries had remarkable success in the Polynesian islands — perhaps because their belief that the native island peoples were descendants of Lehi, the Prophet and Leader of a group of people in The Book of Mormon, gave LDS missionaries extra zeal.
The LDS Church’s early success was the beginning of an unlikely migration from tropical paradise to arid desert Utah. Today, there are more than 25,000 people of Pacific island descent living in Utah — the largest Polynesian population in the United States behind California and Hawaii.
The connection between the LDS Church and Polynesian immigration remains strong today.
The Church runs private schools on Tonga and Samoa, and these in turn link up to the LDS Church’s higher education system — a virtual pipeline from Brigham Young University’s Hawaiian campus to its Provo headquarters. These campuses connect students from the far-flung islands of the Polynesian Triangle to the base of Mount Timpanogos.
Of course, not all of the Pacific islanders in Utah are here because of the LDS Church, or are even members. But it’s easy to see how the first immigrants who came to Utah because of the Church — in the early days often arriving with the same missionaries who had converted them — established a foothold.
They paved the way for relatives and friends from close-knit, family-centric communities perched on tiny rocks, amid a vast Pacific Ocean, to make the journey to the USA mainland, and Utah, and dwell in the shadow of Temple Square, Salt Lake City, the Church’s world headquarters.
No matter where their home island is, Pacific islanders in Utah share a common set of difficulties — there are language barriers and racial prejudices, and these can lead to economic disadvantages. That’s often where O. Fotu Katoa comes in.
From a windowless room, decorated with only a smattering of reminders of Tonga (a framed ocean sunset, a tribal axe), Katoa, a second-generation Tongan-American, serves as Director of the State’s Office of Pacific Islander Affairs.
Actually, he is the office.
“My charge is to ensure that the needs of the Pacific islander community are met,” Katoa says. “That’s a pretty broad job description, no? I deal with everything from an issue at the elementary school where they can’t tell who a kid’s guardian is, to immigration issues, all the way up to gang killings involving Pacific islanders.”
Katoa’s father converted to the LDS Church in Tonga. When Katoa was 5 years old, the family came
to Utah to take his brother to Primary Children’s Medical Center for an operation to save his eyesight. The family stayed, and Katoa grew up here and has watched the Polynesian community grow and struggle as well.
“I was raised at home in the Tongan tradition,” he says. “I’ve lived here 40 years, and I’m still fluent in Tongan.”
Katoa says an unflinching respect for elders and authority, as well as a strong sense of kinship that extends far out into the family tree are powerful and positive marks of not only the Tongan tradition, but for all of Polynesian culture.
But he believes the struggles his community faces lie in the gap between the younger and older generations.
“We’ve got to keep an eye on the third and fourth generations, the ones that are born and raised here,” Katoa says.
“I would say they have a little bit of an identity crisis. You are a Pacific islander, you are expected to have this heritage, but you know nothing about it. You’re raised here in western society, but you’re still different, still Polynesian. A lot of those kids are confused.”
Katoa attended East High in the 1980s; he says that he knows personally the sense of isolation and the racial barriers Polynesian teens often face.
“We had to stick together; we had to protect each other. Kids at other schools would get together and single us out and beat us up.”
But now as man in the middle, acting as liaison between the community he was raised in, and the Government, he sees that sometimes the traditions themselves cause conflict.
In Tongan and Samoan culture, extended families all participate in the upbringing of the children. Aunts and uncles are as much a part of a child’s development as mother and father. Take Fox 13’s jovial morning features reporter Big Budah, who, as a young boy, was sent to Samoa from Los Angeles for “shaping up,” says his “big brother” Kap Teo-Tafiti, now a performer at the Polynesian Cultural Center on Oahu, Hawaii.
In fact, Teo-Tafiti is one of the main attractions at the Center. The grand finale of the Center’s spectacular evening show is Teo-Tafiti’s furious fire-spinning. His muscular, corded and compact frame is covered in small cuts and scars from the fire-dancing.
“He came to us in Samoa from Compton, California, with his baggy pants and walking like a thug,” Kap recalls about Big Budah. We told him, “This is Samoa. You don’t walk that way. You respect your elders. I shaped him in the Samoan way. He really learned to work hard in Samoa.”
But when this it-takes-a-village-to-raise-a-child system is employed in the opposite direction — from the islands to Utah — confusion often results from the clash with the orderly, Western system.
“Within the system, there come problems of legal guardianship,” Katoa says. “You have kids moving from an uncle to an aunt and back to their parents, and the system doesn’t understand.”
But the real problem, he says, is older generational parents who hide behind tradition. The Tongan Crip Gang and the Samoan gang the Baby Regulators are among the most criminally active gangs in Utah, and Katoa says the gravity of that is not sinking in with traditionalists in the community.
“There is denial there,” he says. “I go out to the prison, and I see our people in there. But many people believe we can fix this by telling them to go to church more. They say, ‘Oh, they’re just being kids,’ but we have such a small community, yet we are contributing disproportionately to big problems.”
Yet Katoa speaks with pride about his focus on education and the scholarships and the hundreds of Pacific Islanders enrolled in universities across Utah, thanks to a mentoring program through the University of Utah. And more and more, young Pacific Island men have found a structured way to blend their cultures with mainstream America.
Take a look at the roster of any professional or college football team and you’ll see a representation of vowel-filled Polynesian names, like the Bengals’ Jonathan Fanene and the Steeler’s bushy-haired safety Troy Polamalu. Big media has noticed this—NPR, 60 Minutes, and The New York Times, have all done articles about the Polynesian football phenomenon.
Many of these players started their careers at Utah high schools. And football offers Polynesian kids a leg up: In 2009, 18 out of every 28 Division 1 College football scholarships - awarded to High Schoolers - went to Polynesians.
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