Decolonising Trauma: Indigenous Perspectives on Healing

Research for a PhD exploring trauma beyond the individualist lens of Western psychology.

To support this research, I am returning to my roots as a documentary photographer to create a film interviewing Indigenous communities across the globe, listening to their perspectives on trauma and healing.

Western psychology has given us important tools. But it is shaped largely by Eurocentric and individualist frameworks. This film seeks to help decolonise the field of trauma by centralising Indigenous elders, healers, and knowledge keepers as authorities in conversations about healing in mental health.

Many Indigenous traditions understand trauma not only as something that happens inside a person, but as a rupture in relationships between people, land, ancestors, and community. These relational, ecological, and ancestral perspectives are urgently needed in today’s mental health discourse.

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What the Funding Will Support

This crowdfunder will primarily support the Indigenous communities I will be collaborating with.

Funding will go towards:

• Honorariums for elders and knowledge keepers

• Paying community liaisons and translators

• Gifts and ceremonial offerings

• A reciprocity fund for participating communities

• Paying Indigenous filmmakers to create and contribute their own stories, ensuring authentic self-representation alongside my interviews

• Basic filming equipment

• A producer to edit and shape the documentary

Your contribution is not simply a donation — it is an act of reciprocity.

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Contributor Gift

As a thank you for your support, you will receive a free digital download of the completed film when it is released early next year.

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The Vision

The film will:

• Platform Indigenous voices as leaders in trauma and healing

• Broaden mental health discourse to include relational and ecological understandings

• Be screened at educational venues, cinemas, and festivals

• Support dialogue around decolonising trauma practice

The wider aim is to:

• Shift trauma discourse beyond Eurocentric individualism

• Encourage integration of community, ritual, and land-based healing perspectives

• Foster renewed belonging and collective responsibility

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Your support could make a meaningful contribution to the future of trauma research and mental health practice.

If you believe the field of trauma needs wider, more inclusive perspectives, I invite you to be part of this journey.

Together, we can help reshape the conversation