Braiding Neuroscience, Decolonization, and Mental Wellness

Summary

Western neuroscience and Indigenous knowledge systems, often viewed as separate, converge when examining brain science alongside Indigenous teachings about land, story, ceremony, and relational responsibility. Mind–body interventions like meditation, ritual, and kindness practices alter neural networks, immune signaling, and gene expression, echoing Indigenous understandings that relationships, story, and ceremony are medicine. Braiding neuroscience, the Decolonization Equation framework, and Indigenous teachings indicates that increasing kindness and prioritizing decolonization are ethically essential, biologically feasible, and culturally rooted components of mental health strategies.

Study at a glance

Abstract

Western neuroscience and Indigenous knowledge systems are often seen as separate worlds. However, when we examine emerging brain and molecular science alongside Indigenous teachings about land, story, ceremony, and relational responsibility, a powerful convergence emerges. Mind–body interventions, including meditation, reconceptualization, ritual, and kindness practices, are now demonstrated to alter neural networks, immune signaling, and gene expression in ways that echo what Indigenous peoples have known for generations: relationships, story, and ceremony are medicine. This paper braids three strands: Neuroscience and the biology of intensive mind–body practice (Jinich-Diamant et al., 2025). The Decolonization Equation as a structural and relational framework for collective healing (Yellow Bird & Luo, 2025). Indigenous teachings and practices that predate, and in many ways anticipate, today’s mind–body and kindness science (Basso, 1996; Indigenous Oral Scholars, Olson, 2025). Together, they indicate that increasing kindness and prioritizing decolonization are not only ethically essential but also biologically feasible and culturally rooted parts of comprehensive mental health strategies.

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