Ohana

Ohana is the Hawaiian concept and social institution of extended family, encompassing not only relatives by blood and marriage but, in its traditional and continuing usage, close non-kin who are incorporated into the family's network of mutual obligation, support, and belonging, reflecting a conception of family organized around relationship and reciprocal care rather than strictly biological descent. Traditional Hawaiian ohana was historically tied to shared land and resources, with extended family groups working and drawing subsistence together from ancestral land divisions, and the institution carried strong obligations of mutual support, shared childrearing, and collective responsibility for elders and the vulnerable within the group, functioning as the primary unit of economic cooperation and social identity in traditional Hawaiian society. The concept survived the disruption of traditional Hawaiian land tenure and political sovereignty following Western contact and the 1893 overthrow of the Hawaiian Kingdom, and it has remained a living and actively invoked institution in Hawaiian cultural identity and the modern Hawaiian sovereignty and cultural revival movements, where it is frequently articulated as a distinctively Hawaiian model of inclusive, non-biologically-bounded family. The term has also entered wider popular usage, notably through the phrase ohana means family, nobody gets left behind or forgotten, that entered global popular culture through the 2002 Disney film Lilo and Stitch, a usage Hawaiian cultural commentators have discussed as both a form of wider recognition and a simplification of the concept's deeper traditional social and land-based meaning.