SALT LAKE CITY — The University of Utah has created a new center of academic inquiry focused on the people and communities of the Pacific Islands.

This week's action by the University of Utah Board of Trustees creating the Center for Pasifika Indigenous Knowledges aims to bolster academic inquiry in the subject area. Maile Arvin, the director of the new center, hopes the change brings national attention to U. studies on the topic.

"We hope that it will become a hub for scholars nationally and internationally who are doing important Pacific Islands studies work," Arvin said in a statement. The center would support the U.'s seven-year-old Pacific Islands studies program.

In seeking the creation of the center, boosters noted in their formal proposal that Utah has one of the highest relative concentrations of Pacific Islanders among the U.S. states, trailing only Hawaii and Alaska. Nearly 50,000 Pacific Islanders live in Utah, and the state is a "hub" for Tongan Americans, home to more than a quarter of the population in the country.

The new center will focus on scholarship by and for Pacific Islanders as well as other Indigenous peoples. Pacific Islander is a term that encompasses those with roots in Micronesia, Melanesia and Polynesia, though the aim is to incorporate the broader Indigenous community into the center's inquiry, including Native Americans in the Salt Lake City area.

"The point of such collaborations is to highlight the diversity of Indigenous knowledges and the potential for exploring similarities and differences across many Indigenous contexts," reads the proposal for the center.

The word Pasifika in the name of the new center comes from the term used by Pacific Islanders living in New Zealand to identify themselves and to show solidarity with other Pacific Island communities, according to the U.

"We have borrowed it to highlight our local Pacific Islander communities living in Utah and operate in the same spirit of creating coalitions of support," Arvin said.

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Among the aims of the center are promoting research, providing fellowships for graduate students and faculty, and promoting research initiatives with Pacific Island and other Indigenous communities.

"We will also partner with other campus entities to host summer bridge programming to recruit more Pacific Islander and Indigenous students to pursue their undergraduate degrees at the U.," reads the proposal. The center will eventually support a graduate certificate program in Pacific Islands and Indigenous studies.

Arvin received a $1.6 million grant from the Mellon Foundation in 2018 to help develop the Pacific Island program and create the center. The U. also provides funding, and center officials will seek other funding sources. Plans call for the hiring of faculty and relocation of the center from its current location in the School for Cultural and Social Transformation to its own space.

In related news, the Utah Legislature passed a joint resolution during the 2024 legislative session honoring Utah's Pacific Island and Hawaiian cultures and communities, SJR9. It hasn't yet been inked by Gov. Spencer Cox.

The state of Utah, the resolution reads in part, "is committed to cultivating productive relationships with the leaders of Utah's Native Hawaiian and Pacific Islander communities in order to address the needs of the communities."

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