Lee Benson writes: 

High achieving people of Polynesian descent will be front and center the weekend of March 13-14 at the University of Utah’s Rice-Eccles Stadium for the Utah-based PolyStrong Leadership Foundation’s annual summit and gala.

Film director David Derrick (“Moana 2”) will be there, as will Col. Stanley Ulualofaiga Snow, the U.S. Navy’s first Samoan fighter pilot; and leadership coach Sui Lang L. Panoke, as well as Utah Valley University vice president Kyle Reyes — all setting the stage for this year’s PolyStrong lifetime achievement award honoree: swimming and surfing champion Duke Kahanamoku, whose legend has only grown since his death in 1968.

The director of the Duke Kahanamoku Foundation will fly in from Hawaii to receive the award, along with several of the Olympic champion’s Hawaiian relatives. Also front and center will be Isaac Halasima, the Tongan film director whose 2021 documentary about Kahanamoku’s life, “Waterman,” was nominated for an Emmy.

By the time the praising of all these Pacific Islander trailblazers is finished — and the stage is turned over to the Grammy-nominated Polynesian band The Jets to kick off the luau — it will appear that the sky is the limit for anyone with Polynesian heritage.

And that, says Frank Tusieseina, is why they hold these galas every year.

“We want our young people to know that they can be anything they want to be,” he says, “and the only way to do that is if they see what others are doing and accomplishing, people who look just like them. If we can get our young Polynesian people to get a vision that the world is truly their oyster it can change their mindset. They begin to realize, hey, I could be a programmer, I could be an attorney, I could be an engineer, I could be a CEO. And once that light comes on, we can give them the tools to get there, which starts with education.”