Well, this month, our Vegas PBS media crew is taking a closer look at Hawaiian culture.

Aloha.

The media crew is a group of 60 students who work with our producers to create special segments that give you our viewers a glimpse into issues important to young adults.

Let's toss it over to Kyra, who attends Advanced Technologies Academy, also known as ATECH.

aloha.

My name is Kira.

I'm currently an ATECH senior reporting for the Vegas PBS Media Group.

When you hear Hawaii, you probably think of eight tropical islands in the middle of the ocean.

But there's a ninth island in the middle of the desert.

While Las Vegas is probably one of the last places you would think of when you hear the word Hawaii.

For 22,000 Hawaiians, when they hear the word Las Vegas, they think of home.

But how did a desert become reputable for its tropical paradise?

And is it even possible to preserve a culture that has been priced out of paradise over 2000 miles away?

Welcome to Hawaii Culture Club.

You guys know the setup already.

If you knew that we always start off our meetings with singing Hawaii, which is the national anthem of Hawaii.

So this is considered the ninth Island because a lot there's a lot of native Hawaiians that have moved here.

It kind of started back in the 1970s when Boyd gaming kind of started directing like they're targeting Hawaiians to like travel packages to come to Vegas.

Living in Hawaii, it's really expensive and the cost of living is really high.

So anywhere they go for vacation, it's a six hour flight.

Vegas offering kind of like a a good package deal is what kind of started Hawaiians going to Vegas and and then it just got really popular and a lot of Hawaiians started coming here especially because the the economy is similar to Hawaii.

It's a tourist economy.

So people could transfer their jobs in Hawaii to Vegas, jobs in like hospitality.

So if you want to sing with me, you So music, dance, chanting, singing, all of those visual elements, they're kind of common in all cultures.

But what about these elements in Hawaiian culture that kind of makes it, you know, It's really important to the Hawaii culture because before they were a written a language, it was all oral and everything documented was through Oli.

So doing chanting is how they preserved their history and passing it down through generations was how people knew to learn about their ancestors so less than 1% of Hawaiians live in Las Vegas, yet the culture has made itself very presence.

You know, in the city.

How important do you think it is for you to stay engaged in this culture, even if they're not necessarily Hawaiian?

I think it's very important.

For example, I have children of my own, and I don't feel like they've really engaged with their the local Hawai'i culture here in Las Vegas because we're so far away from home and we're so busy in our lives.

And so the Hawaii Culture Club, I think, really brings that that missing element that many students don't have outside of the classroom.

students are the ones who are going to be the driving force of maintaining the Hawaii culture here on the continental US, it's not necessary being a native Hawaiian, but it's being, you know, remembering where you came from, where your family came from.

While Las Vegas may not have the lush mountains and captivating breezes of Hawaii, Hawaiians have and continue to make Las Vegas their new Ninth Island paradise.