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Controversy Poke has existed in Hawaii since the early 1970s, but in the mid to late 2010s, it skyrocketed in popularity in the continental United States. This has allowed for lots of cultural controversy. In October of 2015, a restaurant in New York named Sons of Thunder turned to poke as a backup plan after dealing with stove issues.Since Sons of Thunder's poke boom in 2015, cities like Los Angeles and New York have seen numerous other poke shops open, as well as international destinations like Toronto, London, and Sydney. Various locals shared their thoughts about poke in the mainland: I tried one, and I swore never to go again," said Sonny Acosta, 30, who moved to New York from Honolulu two years ago. "It's not really poke." It's not just that poke tastes better when you're in Hawaii. It's that mainland restaurateurs, bandwagoning on what they see as the biggest trend of the year, have changed it into something altogether different - something that people from Hawaii say doesn't respect their cultural heritage". In an attempt to make an unfamiliar word easier for customers to pronounce, some restaurants changed their spelling of the word to "poki". The spelling, for some Hawaiians, crosses the line of what is and what isn't cultural appropriation. "It's sort of the continuation of the colonization of our people, where they tell us how we should act, and how we should spell and how we should eat our food," said Noelani Puniwai, an assistant professor of Hawaiian studies at the University of Hawaii, Manoa. In 2018, large backlash arose when a poke shop in Chicago placed a trademark on its name “Aloha Poke” and sent many threatening messages to other shops around the country who shared parts of the name to change it immediately. State senator Jarrett Keohokalole shared his frustration at the audacity of non-members of the Hawaiian community using legal mechanisms and bullying natives into not using words and symbols significant to Hawaiian culture. Native Hawaiian experts mention the clash in cultural tendencies as a reason for this incident: European tendencies are centered around patents and copyrights that both incentivize and privatize knowledge and ideas, whereas indigenous cultures such as Native Hawaiians tend to collectively share knowledge and pass it down through successive generations. In response to such an incident, Native Hawaiian organizations and other state agencies pushed to develop a task force that would propose a legal system that would protect the intellectual property and cultural practices of the Native Hawaiians. Kuhio Lewis, the CEO of the Council for Native Hawaiian Advancement (CNHA), supports the task force but is aware of the difficulties with where to draw the lines on who can make such decisions, and who will be allowed to be able to used Native Hawaiian culture, without violating the First Amendment. “At the least, they need to have some cultural sensitivity about how it’s used. They need to know you can’t be telling Native Hawaiian businesses they can’t use their own language”.