About Us
Who We Are
The Polynesian Cultural Center is a nonprofit cultural and educational institution located in Lāʻie, on the North Shore of Oʻahu, Hawaiʻi. Established in 1963, for religious, charitable, and educational purposes,
The Center occupies 42 acres and presents the cultures of six Polynesian island nation — Hawaiʻi, Samoa, Aotearoa, Fiji, Tahiti, and Tonga — through resident villages, cultural demonstration, performance, and interpretive programming.
The Center operates as a living museum. Its villages feature working cultural environments where craft, cooking, language, music, and dance are exhibited daily by people raised and trained in these traditions. Approximately eighty percent of the Center's paid workforce consists of students from adjacent Brigham Young University–Hawaiʻi, many of whom come from the island nations represented here. Programming is developed and reviewed by cultural advisors and practitioners from each nation, who hold authority over how their culture is presented.
The Center is a registered 501(c)(3) nonprofit corporation dedicated to cultural preservation and education and is affiliated with The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Revenue generated through admissions and operations supports the Center's cultural mission and the education of BYU–Hawaiʻi students, to whom the Center has provided millions of dollars in employment support and scholarships.
Our Vision
One Ohana Sharing Aloha.
The Center holds the cultures of six island nations side by side, each represented in its own voice and on its own terms. This vision governs how the institution operates internally and what it extends to those who visit.
Our Mission
To share the cultures, diversity and spirit of Polynesia in a unique and uplifting way that blesses and inspires all who visit, while contributing to the educational development and growth of all employees.
What This Mission Requires
Preservation through practice. Language, chant, navigation, weaving, carving, tattoo, cooking, and dance are sustained where they are actively practiced and deliberately taught. The Center is structured to be a site of that transmission, and maintains an archival program documenting its collections and history in partnership with the BYU–Hawaiʻi Archives.
Authority held by cultural stakeholders. Representation of each culture is directed by advisors, practitioners, and staff of that culture.
Portrayal of living cultures. The nations of Polynesia are contemporary societies, not historical subjects. The Center presents inherited tradition as it is carried forward today, offered by those to whom it belongs.
Education as the operating purpose. The Center's cultural and educational missions are structurally interdependent. Admissions revenue funds operations and student education; students form the majority of the workforce that carries out the cultural work. Since its establishment in 1963 all revenues and fundraising have exclusively been used to operate the Center directly and support BYU-Hawaii students via scholarship and employment.
Origins
Lāʻie has been a gathering place for peoples of the Pacific for generations, and the community that formed here drew families from island nations across Polynesia. The Center is a direct outgrowth of that community.
Beginning in 1948, Lāʻie residents organized a recurring hukilau program — a communal net-fishing gathering with feast and entertainment — that drew visitors for more than two decades and established that the public would travel to Lāʻie for a Polynesian cultural experience. In the 1958–59 school year, the Church College of Hawaiʻi organized approximately seventy-five students and local youth into a performing company instructed by Hawaiian, Māori, Samoan, and Tongan cultural authorities. The company's Waikīkī productions began in April 1960; by March 1962 it was filling the Waikīkī Shell, drawing more than three thousand people to its first performance there.
Construction began in February 1962 on a twelve-acre site along Kamehameha Highway. More than one hundred volunteer builders, drawn from across the South Pacific and from Lāʻie itself, raised the original thirty-nine structures using ʻōhiʻa and coconut logs, indigenous thatch supplemented with woven sugarcane lau, pili grass from Hawaiʻi Island, and ʻafa sennit sourced in Samoa and Tonga. Villages were led by cultural specialists, several brought directly from the islands they represent, and carved elements, materials, and artisans were brought from Fiji, Tonga, Tahiti, and New Zealand. Lāʻie families prepared the grounds, and a Māori cultural group of 148 members traveled from New Zealand at their own expense to complete the work.
The Polynesian Cultural Center was dedicated on October 12, 1963, and opened to the public two days later.
Relationship with Brigham Young University–Hawaiʻi
The Center and the University are sister institutions. The Center was established, in part, to provide employment enabling students to fund their education, and that function remains central.
BYU–Hawaiʻi enrolls students from more than sixty countries. Approximately eighty percent of the Center's paid workforce is drawn from that student body, serving in nearly every department — cultural presentation and performance, and equally operations, hospitality, finance, and management. Through the University's work-study program, students receive wages, scholarship support, and professional experience within a working institution. That program is built on a principle of returnability, and the Center reports that many graduates return to their home countries and communities.
Our Commitment
The Center counts more than fifty million guests since 1963. Its obligations are unchanged: to preserve the cultures entrusted to it, to represent them accurately and under the direction of those to whom they belong, and to support the education of the students who make that work possible.