On a freshwater lagoon in Lāʻie, on Oʻahu's windward shore, a fleet of double-hulled canoes glides past the audience while live musicians play and performers tell stories drawn from across the Pacific. The show is called HUKI. On October 19, 2026, it runs from 12:40 to 1:30 p.m. at the Polynesian Cultural Center, 55-370 Kamehameha Highway, included with admission packages that start at $94.95.
The word huki is Hawaiian for "to pull," and the show builds its whole narrative around that idea. According to the Polynesian Cultural Center, the theme runs from the legend of the demigod Maui pulling up the islands to the history of the hukilau, the communal net-fishing tradition that once defined life in Lāʻie. The through-line is that the ocean does not divide Polynesian peoples but unites them as one ʻohana, or family.
The hukilau is not a decorative reference. It is bound up with the story of the Polynesian Cultural Center itself. A hukilau was a communal Hawaiian fishing method in which an entire village worked together to net a school of fish, pulling, or huki, the ropes to drive the catch shoreward. The catch was divided among everyone who helped.
In the 1940s and 1950s, the local LDS Church held traditional lūʻau and hukilau gatherings as a way to earn money to rebuild the local church that had been destroyed in a fire. The gatherings proved popular with locals and tourists alike, and in the 1960s the idea expanded into a permanent attraction.
That success planted the seed for a permanent attraction. The Polynesian Cultural Center opened on October 12, 1963, on 42 acres of land belonging to what is now Brigham Young University–Hawaii, owned by the LDS Church and staffed largely by students from the university. Its stated purposes were to provide employment for those students and to preserve and share the cultures of Polynesia. Today it holds eight simulated island villages and describes itself as a living museum.
The lagoon show has its own lineage. HUKI succeeded the earlier canoe pageant Rainbows of Paradise, soft-launching in 2018 and premiering officially on August 18, 2018, with the subtitle "One ʻohana sharing aloha."
At the time, Delsa Moe, the center's vice president of cultural presentations, explained the shift in emphasis. "Huki is a very unique canoe celebration. It's very different from anything PCC has done in the past," she said. "We're not focusing on the individual cultures as much as we are on the ocean and how it pulls us all together. We also use this theme to tell the story of Laie, and how the Polynesians came together in this place." Canoe show manager Jon Raymond Mariteragi described a narrative that opens with dramatizations of Maui harnessing the sun and dragging up the islands, then portrays the ocean as a highway along which island peoples met, traded, intermarried, and sometimes fought.
Then came the pandemic. The show was suspended in 2020 and stayed dark for four years. It returned on August 9, 2024, in a substantially reworked form. "Although the title is still 'Huki', it is not the same show we had pre-COVID," Moe said in the center's blog. "Huki is an introduction to the cultures, and it will get the guests excited about what they can learn, see and do in the villages." The relaunch also moved the show to the start of the day, at 12:40 p.m., so that village tours and canoe rides could run uninterrupted through the afternoon. Guests arriving at the south lagoon are greeted with an immersive pre-show before the main performance.
The production is a substantial undertaking behind the scenes. The center's blog has profiled seamstress supervisor Jesse Allred, who led the crafting of the HUKI costumes despite having no formal training in the field, part of what the center describes as a village-wide effort to bring the show back.
For visitors, the logistics are straightforward but worth planning around. The center's own page advises arriving early: gates open at 12:15 p.m. for a 1:00 p.m. start, though the October 19 listing places the performance at 12:40. The show is included with admission rather than sold as a separate reserved-seat ticket, and the center is closed Sundays, Wednesdays, Thanksgiving, and Christmas. The $94.95 figure is the entry point for admission packages, which bundle the villages, the canoe show, and other experiences; premium tiers add lūʻau dining and reserved seating at the evening show Hā: Breath of Life.
What a visitor actually gets for that price is a piece of theater that could not be staged anywhere else in the islands. The canoes are the stage. The lagoon is the proscenium. And the story being told, about pulling together to bring something ashore, is the same story that built the town around it.