Indigenous oral traditions and psychological well-being under modernization: from external valuation to relational selfhood.

Across many Indigenous communities, modernization, urbanization, market integration, formal schooling, language shift, and cultural commodification have reshaped the conditions under which psychological well-being is understood and sustained. These pressures influence how Indigenous identities, languages, knowledges, and cultural practices are valued within dominant social, educational, economic, and clinical frameworks. This article conceptualizes Indigenous oral traditions as living psychosocial knowledge embedded in community-held epistemic and relational infrastructures and examines their significance for psychological well-being under modernization. Drawing on Indigenous and decolonial perspectives, it introduces external valuation as a middle-range analytical construct describing how Indigenous lifeworlds are judged through criteria defined outside the communities concerned, including productivity, marketability, standardized achievement, formal recognition, policy usefulness, and public visibility. Such valuation may intensify alienation, shame, cultural disconnection, identity insecurity, weakened belonging, and loss of self-continuity. Oral traditions, including storytelling, creation accounts and sacred histories, songs, chants, ritual narratives, oral histories, and place-based accounts, are examined as practices that carry memory, ethics, identity, spiritual orientation, and intergenerational knowledge. The article proposes four interrelated psychosocial pathways through which oral traditions may become relevant to culturally grounded well-being: meaning-making, cultural continuity, relational selfhood, and social cohesion. These pathways are integrated into a conceptual model linking modernization pressures, external valuation, psychosocial risks, oral traditions, and psychological well-being. By distinguishing broader empirical support, context-specific evidence, and theoretically informed inference, the article avoids presenting these relations as established causal effects. It concludes with implications for culturally inclusive mental health initiatives grounded in community authority, relational accountability, local protocols, and respect for Indigenous knowledge systems.