Connecting cultural wisdom, physical literacy, and physical activity among older adults from diverse Indigenous communities: an exploratory review
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Indigenous older adults across the globe face higher rates of chronic illness and lower life expectancy than non-Indigenous populations, yet little research has examined how physical literacy might support their health and well-being. Traditionally applied to children and youth, physical literacy-understood as one's relationship with movement and physical activity across the life course-shares with Indigenous worldviews an emphasis on holistic well-being rooted in culture, community, and the environment. This exploratory review examines global literature to identify how physical literacy concepts-such as motivation, confidence, physical competence, and knowledge-connect with ways of knowing, being, and doing among Indigenous older adults, as well as in physical activity programs for this population. Findings reveal strong connections between physical literacy and culturally grounded forms of movement, with successful programs often integrating physical activity with cultural practices such as sharing circles. These initiatives reflect holistic views of health and highlight opportunities for culturally rooted approaches to physical literacy. The findings suggest that meaningful engagement with Indigenous older adults calls for physical literacy frameworks co-developed through community partnerships that honor Indigenous ways of knowing, being, and doing. Implications for policy and practice include the need for participatory program design that prioritizes social connection, intergenerational learning, spiritual health, and community well-being.
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 | 0.003 | 0.010 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.007 | 0.007 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 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".