Ohana
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
For other uses, including the football player, see Ohana (disambiguation).
Part of Hawaiian culture, ohana means family in an extended sense of the term including both blood-related or extended. It emphasizes that family and friends are bound together and members must cooperate and remember one another. The term is cognate with (and its usage is similar to) the New Zealand Māori term "whānau".
In Hawaiian, the word is "'ohana" with the leading inverted apostrophe indicating a glottal stop or "‘okina."
In contemporary Hawaiian life, an "ohana unit" is a part of a house that may contain a grandparent or may be rented to the general public. Ohana is one of the themes of Lilo & Stitch ("Ohana means family, and family means nobody gets left behind. Or forgotten.").
The root word "oha" refers to the root or corm of the kalo, or taro plant (the staple "staff of life" in Hawaii), which Kanaka Maoli consider to be their cosmological ancestor.
