In bloom: pacific islanders plant new roots in utah.

• Author: Stewart, Heather
• Position: Business Trends

It's a busy day at the Hawaiian Hut. The little shop, just west of Redwood Road, offers custom-made leis--and it's graduation season. Pelenaise Mataele, who owns the store along with her husband, Tupouniva Mataele, sits at a table covered with heaps of flowers, stringing orchids, carnations, ginger blossoms and plumeria into delicate and fragrant leis.

While high school and college graduations bring a flurry of orders for leis, Mataele says the Hawaiian Hut keeps busy all year selling leis for weddings, funerals, birthdays and other celebrations. And on Mother's Day, demand for leis hits an all-time high. "When you buy a lei, you buy one for your mom, one for your grandma, one for your sister, one for your auntie," says Mataele. "So Mother's Day is our busiest day of the whole year."

The Hawaiian Hut does a thriving business catering to the growing population of native Hawaiians and Pacific Islanders living in Utah. The state ranks third, behind Hawaii and Alaska, for the percentage of its population who identifies as Pacific Islanders. While Pacific Islanders make up just 0.4 percent of the total United States population, they account for 1.3 percent of Utah's residents.

Mataele says the Hawaiian Hut actually has a very mixed client base. For the most part, it's non-Islanders who come looking for leis, as Islanders usually know someone who can send the flowers to them. Islanders come for the specialty foods the store carries: coconut milk, taro root and leaves, macadamia nuts, green bananas, corned beef, lamb, and seafood like mussels, clams, squid and sea urchin.

"We try to sell anything we think an Islander would want," she says.

That's kind of a tall order, considering that Pacific Islanders don't really form a homogenous cultural group. About 20 different Pacific Islander ethnicities live in the United States, from three distinct regions in the Pacific--Polynesia, Micronesia and Melanesia--encompassing islands as varied as Samoa, Fiji, Guam, New Zealand and the Caroline Islands.

Island Culture in the Desert

The reason Utah boasts such a strong concentration of Pacific Islanders is simple. Missionaries from The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints began traveling to the Polynesian islands in the late 19th century. With religious ties to the state, Pacific Islanders began immigrating to Utah in later decades, particularly after World War II.

And the tide of Islander immigration continues--the state's Islander population grew 72...