To Write a Wrong 

On April 21, 2014, convicted Tongan Crip gang member Siale Angilau began his federal racketeering trial by lunging at a witness testifying against him. He was armed with a pen. He was stopped in his tracks by four bullets fired by a deputy U.S. marshal. Twenty-five-year-old Angilau later succumbed to these wounds. Within hours, his name took on a life of its own, garnering the typical breathless, frantically breaking coverage from local TV and print media, as well as from outlets such as CNN and even England's Daily Mail.

Locally, one daily newspaper initially identified Angilau as "a get for law enforcement"—essentially a prime arrest for the good guys. Another account quoted a witness to the shooting—and a family relation to one of Angilau's robbery victims—who told reporters that his being shot in front of his mother was a sad turn of events, but "obviously, he has no heart." Another local publication noted Angilau's tragic turn from an all-region football player at East High School in 2005 to an incarcerated gang member a few years later. That article quoted a woman set to testify about how, in 2002, a then-14-year-old Angilau punched her in the face while stealing cigarettes from a 7-Eleven. The woman's epitaph of Angilau, the teenage career criminal, was simple: "He wasn't going to change. He just got worse."

On Salt Lake City's west side, the close-knit and insular Polynesian community lives in a tradition born of the islands. But here in the Rocky Mountains, many live on a cultural island, seemingly apart from others. They revere their elders, the law and the law enforcers. When a youth breaks the law, it brings shame on the elders and silence from loved ones. Shame casts young people away from church, family and friends and into a kind of exile.

Angilau had already been behind bars for seven years, having pleaded guilty to robbery and assault charges in state court, under the impression that he would not be federally charged for the same crimes. During that time, Angilau refused to see visitors and returned letters and packages from family members. In the rare times he talked to family, he told them he just didn't want them to become sad, thinking about him locked up.

The first time in years many of his family members had seen him was the day he was shot and killed.

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Angilau's death—and the reaction to it—is what prompted his sister Tolina Tausinga, along with others, to form the Raise Your Pen Coalition. To Tausinga and other coalition founders, the group's work—to provide a voice for disenfranchised Pacific Islanders—is very personal, in that they refuse to let others write off her brother's legacy simply as that of a violent gangster.

She remembers the brother who got into trouble, made serious mistakes when he was a teenager and deserved an appropriate punishment for those crimes. But she also clings to the memory of her protective little brother—the one with an old soul who acted like the eldest child. The one who made her laugh when, one moment, he would be carrying her kids around like footballs and the next moment would be calling on his siblings to help their parents clean their house. The brother who every Sunday brought groceries to the grandparents of a friend on the street who lived by themselves, and even mowed their lawn.

"He just had a solid heart," Tausinga says.

He was the brother who laughed and played Wrestlemania with his brothers as a kid, and made his sisters scrunch their faces in disgust when he would eat his peanut-butter & jelly sandwiches with ramen noodles. He was the brother who chewed his siblings out for smoking, drinking or sneaking out to parties and who would make certain his friends never used bad language around his sister.

He was the brother they remember who, before his incarceration at 18, desperately wanted his younger brother to not make the same mistakes he had.

In this era of seemingly never-ending police shootings, it is not uncommon to see communities galvanized along color lines and protests organized among citizens who disproportionately find themselves in the crosshairs of police-issued firearms. That phenomenon, however, was relatively unknown to Pacific Islander youth in Utah—until Angilau's death. Right or wrong, his example has now ignited a first in Utah: a Pacific Islander youth-advocacy group challenging the "school-to-prison pipeline" and educating community members about their rights when it comes to the law and those tasked with enforcing it.

The group has clamored for more information about Angilau's death—hoping to legally challenge the federal government's refusal to release video footage of the courtroom incident—but they've also held peaceful marches and contributed to food drives. In May, the coalition will be honored by the American Civil Liberties Union of Utah for community organizing. But, even as they organize, they still mourn. And they still await the sentencing of Siale's younger brother, Villisoni, who will be sentenced in May—on the same day as the ACLU award ceremony—after pleading guilty to a gang-related manslaughter.

The Raise Your Pen coalition struggles for recognition, even among some of the conservative elders in the Pacific Islander community who still aren't completely onboard with the group. One of the organizers' biggest challenges is making sure their message remains positive despite the negatives stacked up against them.

"It's hard to push and want to bring positive change when there is so much pain everywhere," Tausinga says. "But at the same time, that's where all the passion and the love come from. We don't want to see anyone else's kids or the young men in Glendale—or any community, for that matter—follow through with what society has already labeled them as. It's not OK."

For Tausinga, her brother's death provided a visceral and very rude awakening about the need to bring her community together.

"I wasn't living life until after they took my brother's," she says.

Good From the Hood
While the west side is a place Tausinga is proud to call home, it's also a place haunted by the ghosts of brothers gone—either incarcerated or killed.

"It's like a slideshow in my mind," Tausinga says. "When I think of all the streets and blocks of Glendale, it's like Memory Lane, but its also like a cemetery."

Tausinga's friend was shot dead on California Avenue; others were taken from the neighborhood and incarcerated at the Point of the Mountain and in federal lockups far from Utah. A brother of another coalition member, who had been swept up in racketeering charges, was serving time in a Virginia federal penitentiary when he was stabbed to death by another inmate in 2010. To this day, the family doesn't know why or how it happened.

For Tausinga, death, incarceration and crime have for too long been just a shockingly "normal" way of life in her neighborhood. Kids grew up in homes where parents juggled two or more jobs, and the kids wound up on the streets. They engaged in the kinds of petty crimes their older brothers did, such as "beer runs"—convenience-store robberies for which, in 2010, the U.S. Attorney's Office brought down federal racketeering charges on 16 members of the Tongan Crips gang, including Angilau.

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Tausinga fatalistically accepted the way of life the young men in her family and on her street lived. She didn't condone it; it was just how things were. She now sees that her community has contracted this fatalism as a kind of sickness, swallowing the stereotypes forced on it by society and the media.

"We were never looked at, except for being frowned upon," Tausinga says. The stereotype of the Tongan gangster from Glendale was so persistent, she says, it effectively brainwashed entire generations of her community.

"Why try if you've already told me I'm not going to be anybody but a gang member and a danger to society?" Tausinga says. It's a question that she has to deal with on a day-to-day basis in her current gang-prevention work with neighborhood youth. Her answer now is clear, wrought from the deepest pain over the loss of her brother.

"You are so much more—your talents do matter, don't let the label define who you are," Tausinga says. "But before my brother was taken, I don't think I would have been in that mindframe or that type of thinking."

Tausinga still carries the grief with her wherever she goes. When she first met a City Weekly reporter, she was clad all in black, as a sign of mourning. Her expression flitted from exuberant and joyful when she laughed about a good Siale story, to countenancing a sudden grief and a thousand-yard stare in remembering the loss that's driven her and the coalition over the past year.

After Angilau's death, she says, she was gripped by hate, fear and anxiety. The sight of any kind of a police officer made her sick. Even the sight of a police car could give her a panic attack—and, after her brother's death, there were plenty of police cars around.

In Tongan tradition, a funeral is such a moment of communal solidarity that the ceremony can last up to two weeks, during which time family and friends come to visit the family and bring gifts. In turn, the family feeds all those who come to pay their respects. For a week, the block surrounding the Angilau home was lined with funeral attendee's cars—and, for that week, marked and unmarked police cars hovered close-by with officers stopping attendees on the street asking what they were up to, Tausinga says.

"I felt like they were taunting us," says Dee Ann Tuakalua, another founding member of Raise Your Pen, whose brother John Tuakalau was also indicted as part of the racketeering charges against the Tongan Crips.

The coalition started within a month of the shooting, and its first event was a peaceful march and a vigil on the steps of the federal courthouse. It was a successful first event for the newly formed coalition, but even then, members had to struggle with the challenges of community organizing. For Tuakalau, the members had to be cautious about who spoke to the media for the group's first event, when emotions ran so strong they didn't want to show up on the news as just a bunch of angry islanders.

"We wanted to say how we felt, but at the same time, we didn't want to be portrayed as angry monsters," Tuakalau says.

Luckily, the group gained traction with a number of allies, including NeighborWorks Salt Lake, a west-side community-development and advocacy organization that hosted the town-hall meeting that led to the coalition's creation. Since then, the organization even helped send coalition members to a conference with other nonprofit advocacy organizations in Cincinnati.

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• Members of the Raise Your Pen Coalition at a June 2014 event on the Federal Courthouse steps.

The group has since learned the ins and outs of holding meetings, keeping minutes and building bridges with other groups. Since the beginning, its focus has been both on preventing community members from being ground under the wheels of the criminal-justice system and on raising awareness about how those wheels of justice ran over their family members.

Coalition members have never denied that their family members were involved in crimes worthy of punishment, but they questioned the political motivations that came with labelling the Tongan Crip gang as an organized criminal enterprise worthy of being charged with racketeering.

Like others, Angilau pleaded guilty to state charges in 2009 after U.S. marshals recommended that no federal charges be filed. A year later, however, Salt Lake District Attorney Lohra Miller joined the FBI in announcing new racketeering indictments against Angilau and 16 other TCG members. In a defiant press conference, Miller applauded the new charges, saying they had effectively "cut the head off the snake."

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Angilau's attorney Michael Langford told City Weekly in 2014 that for prosecutors to prove racketeering, they need to show that crimes benefited a criminal enterprise. He doesn't deny TCG is a gang that has committed serious crimes, but he wouldn't go so far as to call it organized crime, which the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act of 1970 was designed to target.

It's true that Angilau's crimes and those of other gang members were brazen and sometimes violent. But they weren't necessarily akin to the actions of a foot soldier in a mafia family who might rob a truck and then kick some of the illicit profits up to the head of the family. Angilau's first robberies, in 2002, were for potato chips and cigarettes—not exactly the kinds of items one might divvy up to the capo in charge. Even according to the federal government's own 2010 indictment, "there is no formal structure or hierarchy" within the TCG gang.

The coalition is hoping to raise funds to mount a legal battle to have the video of Angilau's shooting released. Too many questions hover around the incident: Community members want to know whether or not the marshal verbally warned Angilau before firing or perhaps acted with malice (one of Angilau's charges stemmed from being in the same car as another TCG member who had fired on U.S. marshals in 2007).

The coalition is equally committed to offering other resources to the community. They've raised barrels of canned food in a west-side food-donation drive, and collaborated with Racially Just Utah to host a spoken-word event called "Race Matters" in February. Justice for their fallen brother is still a personal goal—but, more than that, they want to create the change they wish had occured in their community years ago.

"That's our whole motive now, is trying to wake our people up," Tuakalau says. "We feel if we did this a long time ago, Siale would still be here—our brothers wouldn't be incarcerated. They would have had these resources. They would have had someone to tell them there are other ways."

What the White People Say
In Tongan, there is a word—faka'apa'apa—which, in the loosest sense, means simply "respect" but, in a greater sense, goes to the heart of Tongan culture: respect for parents, respect for elders, respect for authority.

"They're basically our grassroots," Tausinga says of her elders. "[They're] why we're alive." That being said, her generation has not always done as the elders have, deferring to external authorities of the law and government. "I'm not being racist at all, but it's usually whatever the white man says—whatever the policeman or the man on TV, whatever they say—is what they go by. I don't see it like that."

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But this respect is a strong current to swim against, and one Tausinga says wouldn't be challenged if it weren't for the restless feeling among her community's youth about the sweeping federal racketeering charges and the final indignity of her brother's death in a setting meant to be an arena of fairness and justice.

This tension in challenging the criminal-justice system's authority stems from an intensely hierarchical culture in Polynesian society. Lea Lani Kinikini-Kauvaka is a former university lecturer and scholar-activist working on issues of Tongan migration and diaspora. She's currently working on a book expanding on her doctorate thesis about how Pacific Islander men have been disproportionately targeted and incarcerated by law enforcement.

Tongan culture, Kinikini-Kauvaka says, has long relied on top-down authority. Tonga itself can claim one of the oldest monarchies, dating back to 950 A.D. As an empire defined by hundreds of islands, Tonga was able to resist being colonized by Western forces and by other Polynesian societies through its rigid hierarchical system, she says. Villages deferred to chiefs and priests. In a culture of navigators, each canoe operated within militaristic chains of command, deferring ultimate authority to canoe captains to ensure the boat party's survival in battle and on long journeys.

When these cultures migrated to the United States, this sense of obedience was transplanted to a new set of leaders and circumstances.

"It's the position of the reverend or the bishop that took the place of the village chief, and the church kind of took the place of the village." Kinikini-Kauvaka says.

This strong communion remains a bedrock in Tongan communities, where Kinikini-Kauvaka says children regularly give up part of their paychecks to their parents. It's frowned upon for children to leave their parent's home while in their 20s, and every family member pitches in to cover expenses for funerals, weddings and births.

"These things happen regularly, and you're constantly connected to this wider collective in your extended family," Kinikini-Kauvaka says. It's a beautiful harmony, but it's also one where the youth—which sometimes can be a term applied to islanders even in their 30s and 40s—aren't expected to speak out of turn.

Charlene Lui is the executive director of education equity at Granite School District and has, for decades, been an advocate for the Pacific Islander community. During that time, she's seen that community make incredible strides. Now, with Raise Your Pen, she recognizes a unique coalition that may feel a little more impatient about social-justice issues than the older generation does.

"I think they might look at us and think we've compromised because we've been here for so many years," Lui says. "But I think instead what it is, is that, for some of us who have been activists for many years, it's just that there are multiple ways for us to address the situation."

Working in the school district, Lui says she agrees wholeheartedly with the coalition's efforts to stop the community's youth from being flushed down the school-to-prison pipeline. It's a cause she fights for in encouraging culturally responsive policies in school discipline and teaching.

Ultimately, she thinks the coalition has helped the community talk and have a dialogue among itself.

"The great thing that came to light out of the Siale situation is that, as a community, we realize there are allies that want to help us, but we really need to help ourselves," Lui says.

Raise Your Pen is unique in giving youth a platform to speak their minds, even where elders might hold their tongues. It is also unique because of the sister power behind the coalition. Faka'apa'apa can also apply to the covenant between brother and sister, in a culture where, traditionally, brothers were always expected to protect their sisters. The sisters, far from being powerless, were in charge of ceremonial powers over many of the rituals governing daily existence.

"Usually, it's the brothers protecting the honor of the sisters [in Tongan society]," says Kinikini-Kauvaka. "So, it's kind of a reversal—but it's very organic, it's very much in line with the cultural ethic of love and respect."

A Celebration, Not a Protest
Kinikini-Kauvaka, as a Fiji-based researcher and activist, sees disturbing parallels in the police response to Pacific Islanders in Salt Lake City to the way blacks and Latinos find themselves the target of law enforcement across the country.

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"In Salt Lake City, there are very few minorities and very few black people, and I think that Tongans kind of fill a niche of this dangerous individual with a dark body," Kinikini-Kauvaka says. All the issues that Raise Your Pen has dedicated to fighting are simply another chapter in the ongoing American conversation about what race is, she says. "It's coming out more and more that we're not through with this conversation."

In a modest apartment off Redwood Road, the core members of Raise Your Pen held an April meeting to plan the group's future. Tausinga took to taking minutes, and the group looked ahead at their coming goals skeched out on poster-sized note sheets while Angilau's toddler nephew ran circles around the apartment when not periodically being herded back to his mother's side.

In the near future, organizers hope to finalize obtaining 501(c)(3) nonprofit status—a big milestone. But perhaps even more pivotal is the coalition's one-year anniversary celebration, to be held on Angilau's birthday: May 23.

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With everything the coalition had been through over the past year still fresh in the group's memory, the focus again was how to craft a message into something positive. Tuakalua wanted to be sure that, while they called on support from groups opposed to police brutality, the event didn't get taken over by the shouting of "angry-ass people."

"We want a celebration, not a protest," she said.

The women know they have goals set beyond those sketched out on poster sheets that may never be accomplished during their lifetimes. But that lack of progress isn't daunting compared to what they have already accomplished: establishing a new legacy for themselves, their families, their community and their brother.

"The last thing you will remember of our brother that will live on forever is his legacy through Raise Your Pen," Tausinga says.

Pacific Islanders on Salt Lake City's West Side

Salt Lake City's west side is just a 15-minute drive from the foothills of the east bench, but a world away in terms of opportunity and diversity. Minutes away from the whitest hipster dives and coffee shops east of State Street, Glendale and Rose Park are home to taquerias, Latino malls, African markets and a Buddhist temple. They are also neighborhoods struggling against some stacked odds.

In 2013, the Bureau of Economic and Business Research at the University of Utah's David Eccles School of Business studied the housing and economic conditions of Salt Lake County and flagged Salt Lake City's west side as an area with "neighborhoods of concentrated poverty and segregation."

The study used the Housing and Urban Development's 10-point "Opportunity Index," which ranks locales by how well they connect their residents with schools, jobs and other community assets like stable housing. The west side is ranked at 2.5, while the east side offers more than double that level of opportunity, with a rank of 6.3.

The west side is also home to one of the largest populations of Native Hawaiians and Pacific Islanders (NHPI) in the country. The most recent census data ranks Utah as No. 3, after Hawaii and Alaska, for NHPI population as a percentage of state population. Salt Lake City has the largest population of Tongan-Americans in the country, with West Valley City ranking second.

Unfortunately, Utah also claims some very unfortunate statistics when it comes to the NHPI population. According to analysis done by the California advocacy group Empowering Pacific Islander Communities, between 2002 and 2010, the number of NHPI prisoners in Utah increased 134 percent, while the total number of prisoners increased only 27 percent over the decade. Statewide, the demographic has also struggled in the education system. According to the Utah State Office of Education 6.6 percent of Pacific Islander youth dropped out of high school in 2014, more than two points higher than the 4.4 percent rate for white students and still outpacing the 5.4 percent dropout rate average for all student groups that year.

Salt Lake City Councilman Kyle LaMalfa's 2nd District covers much of the west side, including the Glendale and Poplar Grove neighborhoods, and he's hopeful that a finely tuned west-side master plan can significantly bump up the west side on the opportunity scale. He believes the plan can encourage more commerce along Redwood Road and the 9th & 9th West business node. When it comes to the policing issue, though, LaMalfa says there are no easy answers.

"There is one contingent of people who have been here a long time, mostly older white folks who feel that there is a lack of police presence," LaMalfa writes via e-mail. "But at the same time, I've heard grown Pacific Islanders say out loud that they live in fear of the police, that the police presence is too much."

He's also heard very sincere teachers and administrators argue that the full-time police officer at the Glendale Middle School busts kids for the same adolescent problems that happen at the Hillside Middle School on the east side—but, since it's Glendale, the punishments are more severe and push kids into the criminal-justice system. Even so, says LaMalfa, "There is a cultural perspective with some parents at the PTA who I've heard say that they want the police officer to 'crack down' on the 'bad kids.'"

The only clear thing that stands out to LaMalfa is a sincere desire for better relations and mutual respect between the community and the police. As far as criminal activity goes, LaMalfa says serious gang activity hasn't been a problem since the 1980s and '90s.

"A lot of those systemic crime problems have gone away," LaMalfa says. "What seems to linger is a public perception problem and an investment problem."