Recentering Indigenous Knowledge: A Narrative Review of Recent Developments in Indigenous Health Promotion
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Indigenous health promotion is increasingly recognized as a distinct paradigm that challenges colonial structures and reclaims approaches grounded in Indigenous knowledge systems. However, there remains a limited understanding of how Indigenous scholars and communities are actively redefining health promotion. This narrative review examines 60 peer-reviewed journal articles published between 2015 and 2025 to explore how Indigenous health promotion dismantles colonial structures, applies cultural grounding and adaptation strategies, and engages with Western theories, frameworks and methodologies. Articles were identified through a systematic search of four major health research databases, and focused on food and nutrition, and physical activity programs or research involving Indigenous populations in Canada, Australia, Aotearoa New Zealand, and the United States. Findings reveal that Indigenous health promotion programs and research initiatives are increasingly community-led, and grounded in local knowledge and practices. Many initiatives emphasize reconnection to land and culture and are situated within broader visions of planetary health and environmental justice. Intergenerational knowledge transmission and community governance are central to culturally grounded and effective health promotion efforts. While some Western frameworks are still used, they are often critically adapted or selectively integrated to align with Indigenous values and priorities. This review affirms the essential role of Indigenous knowledge systems in shaping health promotion that is effective and sustainable. It offers direction for reimagining health promotion policy and practice by placing Indigenous leadership and priorities at the center of efforts to achieve health equity and social justice for Indigenous communities.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.005 | 0.016 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.006 | 0.007 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.003 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".