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This article offers an overview of an Indigenous‐led participatory research project, The Future We Dream, co‐developed by rural land defenders in Central America and the Caribbean. To engage in recent dialectics concerning complicity and decolonising methodologies, we centre Indigenous Maya conceptions of health, wellbeing and what 'living well' means to community members. For context, The Future We Dream responds to the 2015 landmark ruling made by the Caribbean Court of Justice affirming the land rights of the Maya people of Southern Belize. Amidst tensions with the state that followed the ruling, an autonomous movement composed of grassroots organisers turned their attention towards imagining and constructing a self‐determined future. In turn, the communities initiated a research exercise inspired by desire‐based methodologies (Tuck, 2009) to articulate a collective vision of a healthful Maya future outside of colonial‐liberal worldviews, and notably, formulating Maya visions of healthful, sustainable worlds. In reporting on this one example of grassroots, anticolonial health research that departs from the hierarchal knowledge production practices of liberal academia, this paper details the collaborative process/project; the complexities/complicities of research involving Indigenous communities; and how Indigenous epistemologies are generative vis‐a‐vis unsettling conventional knowledge production practices in the contentious field of global health research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article offers a critical overview of the coloniality of the broad fields of psychology and global mental health, as well as advocates anti-colonial approaches to childhood studies and wellness that move beyond Western frameworks and Eurocentric models. More specifically, by drawing upon transformative approaches to wellbeing being practiced by mental health promoters from the Caribbean who are committed to decolonisation, we propose, via the notion of 'epistemological jailbreak,' that researchers commit to more inclusive, emancipatory, and praxis-driven research agendas that decentre the hegemony of liberal worldviews and disrupt the homogenising tendencies of conventional knowledge production. To do so, we first provide a brief summary of the ways in which colonial power has shaped global health before contextualising Caribbean realities and castling light on the neuro- and Eurocentrism of childhood development. Next, we detail the multifaceted intricacies and complexities that characterise childhood throughout the Caribbean before concluding with examples of how researchers in the region and beyond are advancing both pluralistic notions and historical-material analyses of wellbeing through anti-colonial and Indigenous approaches to childhood development, cultural therapy, and community health. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Over the past three decades, however, state-sponsored industrial logging, mining, and agribusiness activities have increasingly threatened Maya land rights as the government has granted concessions to multinational corporations without consulting Maya villages. At present, the Toledo Alcaldes Association (TAA), consisting of 78 leaders from 41 Maya communities in Toledo District, is the main representative body of the Maya people. Citing the MLA and TAA's claim that the alcaldes represent a form of customary communal governance sanctioned by Maya communities collectively, the government asserted: "We do not believe that there is such "collective governance system" of the Maya people.". [Extracted from the article]