Hui ‘O Hawai’i, Creighton University’s Hawai’i club, brought a taste of Hawai’i to the Kiewit Fitness Center during their annual lūʻau, which was attended by about 1,000 people, in addition to approximately 200 performers and 50 volunteers.

About 40 to 70 students from Hawai’i attend Creighton every year, and the lūʻau is the university’s largest sanctioned student-led event annually, according to the lūʻau’s emcees.

“I think it’s really important that we do this, and it felt really nice to have the opportunity to do it mainly because, for a lot of people, this is the closest they will get to home before they go home for breaks or summers,” Lama Medeiros, the lūʻau chair and a senior in the College of Arts and Sciences, said. “And so, we really want to give our Hawai’i students, and anybody from Hawai’i, that experience [of home]. Home is wherever your community is, so even though you’re roughly 4,000 miles away, we hope that we could bring the lūʻau to you and your home to you, even if it’s just for two hours.”

The sold-out event on March 29 included food, dance performances, a lei stand and a country store selling Hawai’i goods such as jewelry from Simply Crystal’s Hawai’i and food including pancake mix and other snacks.

“I think that it’s bringing a little bit of Hawai’i to somewhere where it’s very much not Hawai’i. It’s like our home away from home, a sense of community at Creighton and being able to share a little bit of our culture from home [with] Nebraska,” a volunteer for the event, Karina Quan of the College of Arts and Sciences, said.

Throughout the night, joy was contagious. The attendees — which included Creighton students, families of students from Hawai’i, Creighton faculty and their families, and other Omaha community members with ties to Hawai’i — could be seen smiling during the entire event. During the dances performed by students, the performers’ joy was also palpable; this was especially evident during the song “Kāua I Hilo One” by Mark Yamanaka, which the Hui ‘O Hawai’i and lūʻau executive team danced to.

This year’s lūʻau, “202.5 FM,” was themed like a radio show. The hosts, Kaydence Lilio and Trevor Gray, bantered between dances and interacted with the crowd. They described the radio show as “Omaha’s home for Hawai’i’s greatest hits.”

“For the next hour or two, we invite you to join us on a journey of song, love and fun,” Lilio said at the start of the show. “Tonight is a night of culture. Lūʻau is our way of presenting our culture to Omaha and all beyond the islands. Music and hula are two major parts of who we are. We’ve compiled some of our favorite songs and are excited to share them with you tonight.”

Gray echoed her sentiment.

“By the end of our broadcast tonight, we hope that you’re able to get an authentic glimpse of our culture through our performances,” he said.

The performances opened with a song from Creighton’s co-ed a capella group JayBeats. Then, the crowd got to see multiple cultural dances. Each dance told a beautiful story. For example, before one dance, Gray said, “The song paints a picture of love in its most tender form, where every word and gesture is filled with meaning. The lyrics tell a story of two souls drawn together under the cover of night, sharing whispers and gentle touches like the lei of pearls strung together in perfect harmony.”

While most of the dancers were from Hawai’i, not all of them were. Being a member of Hui ‘O Hawai’i is not a requirement to be a dancer in the lūʻau and, according to Medeiros, about 20 of the dancers this year were from the contiguous U.S.

“I’m here just to share the aloha spirit [and] serve some food to the people… I get to experience the culture and, after three years of being here, I’ve learned to grow and love the culture,” Jacob Woolf, a senior in the College of Arts and Sciences from Minnesota who participated in the event, said.

When the lūʻau attendees weren’t enjoying the performances, they were eating the delicious food. A chef from Hawai’i flew to Omaha with a couple of sous-chefs, and they worked with student volunteers to prepare the evening’s meal, according to Medeiros. They started cooking on Wednesday, March 26 for Saturday’s event and had 50 to 60 volunteers helping each day. While some ingredients were flown in from Hawai’i, others were locally sourced from Omaha.

The food included lomi salmon, chicken long rice, kalua pig, haupia and li hing pineapple among other Hawaiin dishes. Everyone in attendance seemed to love it, and several people went up for seconds during the intermission.

“[My favorite food at the lūʻau was] the rice,” one little girl named Grace, who attended the event with her parents because her dad is a Creighton alum, said.

The lūʻau means a lot to the students from Hawai’i and their families.

“I think it’s amazing… I think that the Creighton community is very welcoming and very open to different experiences, because everybody is willing to give it a shot and be in here together,” the sister of Chris Kaho’oilimoku, a Creighton student who performed during the lūʻau, said.

For many, like Sienna Fujiwara, a freshman in the College of Nursing from O’ahu who helped with the country store, the lūʻau conjures up feelings of home.

“It [the lūʻau] means so much more than just a performance… It reminded me of how much I miss being back home, and seeing everyone with their family just reminded me that I’m happy to be here but I also love home,” Fujiwara said.

Hui ‘O Hawai’i has been preparing for this lūʻau since last March when the 2024 lūʻau ended. Medeiros said that a lot of the hard work and planning, including securing reservations, writing the script for the emcees, choreographing the dances and scheduling meetings, occurs over the summer.

“[We’ve been] booked and blessed,” Medeiros said. “A lot of the heavy lifting is in the beginning, and though it dies down, the key to running a program like this is consistency and also dedication. I think that instilling a good routine in not just us execs, but also our dancers, is what allowed us to put on such an amazing show. And I could also tell that they had fun, and that’s the really important part… I think a lot of people make it be like, ‘Well, we have to represent Hawai’i to the best of its ability,’ and… ‘We can’t disappoint our ancestors’… But what’s really important is that you just have fun, because when you do, that’s when you ultimately get to share the culture.”

The funding for the lūʻau comes from the Creighton Students Union, ticket sales, Hui ‘O Hawai’i fundraisers such as their bake sale, the country store and lei stand at the event and their silent auction, according to Medeiros.

Now that this year’s lūʻau is over and has proven to be a success, this year’s vice chair and next year’s chair for the event, College of Arts and Sciences junior Kawena Kekauoha, is beginning to prepare for the next one so that Hui ‘O Hawai’i can keep bringing a piece of Hawai’i — and, for students from the islands, a piece of home — to Creighton’s campus.

“My experience as a Creighton University student is very different from the typical narrative of what a Creighton student should be, because being from Hawai’i has added so much more to that… What it means to be a Creighton student from Hawai’i [is] to lead with aloha and to build community, because no matter how far we are, no matter what happens — whatever circumstances, even if you are on the islands or off — you will always be Hawai’i,” Medeiros said through tears of happiness and gratitude during his closing remarks at the lūʻau. Speaking directly to the audience, he added, “We have shared our gift with you, the gift of aloha. We share our culture, we share our moʻolelo, our stories, and all I ask in return is that you continue our aloha… As you share our aloha and love,… it means a lot.”