Waka Ŋurrkanhayŋu—Regenerating the existence of life”

Humanity is experiencing increasingly existential crises. While the crises are potentially apocalyptic, they also create transformative opportunities toward ways of being-knowing-doing that not only ensure our survival but thriving. Realizing these transformative opportunities requires the prevailing Western worldview remembering and embracing ancient Indigenous worldviews. One potent pathway for accomplishing this paradigm shift is authentically exchanging two-way with Indigenous peoples. To illuminate this pathway and its value, we, a team of Australian Indigenous clan leaders living in the very remote community of Galiwin'ku in Northern Australia and Western researchers, offer knowledges from a long-term initiative that was requested by Yolŋu clan leaders and that we are now coleading, codesigning, coimplementing, and co-evaluating. Our research aimed at reviving and strengthening Yolŋu to heal and reduce "natural" and social disasters and restore health. Utilizing a bricolage research design, we are continuously bridging, uniting, and transcending Indigenous and suitable Western philosophies/worldviews, methodologies, and methods for collecting, analyzing, and coconstructing knowledges. We have developed an Indigenist two-way intercultural kinship-based and clan-based participatory action research that is long-term, heart based, holistic, transdisciplinary, emerging, and iteratively cocreated, coimplemented, coevaluated, and corefined using Yolŋu governance. The knowledges we are coconstructing reveal holistically the dense net of interacting psychological and contextual colonizing practices that systematically weaken Yolŋu and how sophisticated Yolŋu ways of being-knowing-doing strengthen Yolŋu. Several pathways emerged as key levers for removing what weakens Yolŋu and facilitating what strengthens Yolŋu, enabling Yolŋu to regenerate the existence of life by living according to their Yolŋu LAW in harmony with nature again. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved)

Clan · Existentialism · Harmony (color · Humanity · Indigenous · Participatory action research · Transformative learning · Environmental, Ecological, and Cultural Studies · Indigenous Health, Education, and Rights · Participatory Visual Research Methods