About Akamai

AKAMAI is a game of wit, knowledge and humor where players answer questions about Hawai’i, language, traditions and histories, sacred places and popular culture to earn points and claim victory! AKAMAI encourages cooperative relations, and opens pathways to ʻohana principles like kōkua, ʻauamo kuleana, leʻa leʻa, hoʻopono and naʻauao. These values have shaped the game.

As a new Hawaiian board game AKAMAI aspires to support resilient relations between family, friends, peers, elders, children, and all peoples interested in Hawaiʻi, Hawaiian culture, and our diverse cultural communities. These strands of intentionality weave a foundation to help create links between people and place, the past and the present. By honoring Hawaiʻiʻs rich, vibrant, and vital cultures, ultimately, the game is a connector to the things that make Hawaiʻi distinct, enduring and beloved. The secret is in how we play AKAMAI!

EA HAWAIʻI is an animating principle that encourages the pursuit of dreams through liberating pedagogy shaped by aloha. EA HAWAIʻI is also a grass-roots movement for Indigenous higher learning dedicated to radical collaboration, mutual emergence, and the power and purpose of aʻo aku, aʻo mai - by my actions, teach my mind. Students aspire to share joyful and effulgent revelations as a primary interchange with others. In this process, learners become reflective of the clarity and precision needed to embody in themselves the ideas they will then emulate. EA HAWAIʻI scholars are nourished and endorsed by an inter-personal core of recognized master scholars, educators, artisans, and knowledge keepers of the communities in which mentors live and work. Each scholar searches for transformative ways to better serve the people and places of their community, island, and nation. We move toward freedom with freedom.

Hahai no ka ua i ka ululāʻau. 

kaona: Plant a forest and the rains will come.

noa huna: Share purpose with others and live a life of meaning.

AKAMAI is the newest addition to EA HAWAII’s educational repository. The game was conceived by W.S. Pūlama Collier, an EA HAWAIʻI scholar, as a learning/teaching deliverable. The board game resounds with Pulama’s lifelong love of history, language, music, traditions, and inquiry. Hawaiʻi’s radiant beauty, and salient history is also important for future generations of all people connected to the Islands.  The game components and strategies reflect a Hawaiian narrative of Aloha Akua, Aloha Kanaka, Aloha ʻĀina - Divine grace, human compassion and devotion to earth.  To know Hawaiʻi is to know aloha.   

Pūlama Collier, is a scholar, educator, philosopher and artist of Hawaiian language, culture and traditions and the creator of ʻUHANE DESIGNS. A mother of three living in Kūʻau, Maui. Collier is in the final year of her Hawaiian Philosophy Doctoral (DHP) program with EA HAWAIʻI Ecoversity. Her scholarship is summarized as mōʻike aloha- a synergistic idea that aloha is the essence of Hawaiian intelligibility, sense-ability and knowledge which created and sustains the Hawaiian existence.

ʻO ke aloha ka waiwai nui, ʻO kaʻu nō ia e pūlama nei.

Love is our greatest source, it is mine to treasure and cherish.