American Psychologist, Vol 80(8), Nov 2025, 1137-1149; doi:10.1037/amp0001535
Indigenous knowledges have sustained flourishing Indigenous communities for millennia. Colonization and its ongoing coloniality continue to cause a disruption to Indigenous peoples’ flourishing, including health and well-being. Indigenous leaders, including psychologists, across the globe, participate in leadership roles to shift the colonial powers that exist within psychology and in health more broadly. That shift is essential, as it privileges Indigenous knowledges and praxis, and brings in truth-telling, practice-based evidence and Indigenous human rights. The colonial project, however, is centered on hegemonic Eurocentric knowledge systems, which continues to rationalize the dispossession of Indigenous lands, genocide of peoples, and the exploitation of the earth’s resources. Psychology is complicit in perpetrating epistemic violence and practices, which continue ongoing transmissions of colonial oppression. Australian Indigenous psychologists drew on Indigenous leadership and knowledges to develop the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander social and emotional well-being (SEWB) model. Since its development, the accumulating literature relating to SEWB is both prolific and illustrative of its positive outcomes for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people. The aim of this article is to provide a context of psychology’s complicity and active participation in colonization and coloniality, in the Australian context; illustrate Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples’ leadership and advocacy, as an act of self-determination and epistemic justice; describe the foundations, development, and expansion of the SEWB model; and finally recommend strategies to support further expansion of SEWB and the decolonial turn in psychology. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved)