ABSTRACT
This chapter seeks to understand and challenge societal oppression, especially oppression constituted through inequality, poverty, unemployment, flexible-isation of the labour market, disabling practices, hetero-sexism and, of course, colonisation, and also it seeks to understand and challenge oppressive forms of psychology. The chapter critically problematise the thesis that psychology cannot be Indigenous and scientific without endorsing its opposite mirror image. Maori decolonising methodologist Linda Tuhiwai Smith wrote explicitly: 'scientific research is implicated in the worst excesses of colonialism remains a powerful remembered history for many of the world's colonized peoples'. According to Tuhiwai Smith, Indigenous people are not only resisting other's sciences but constructing their own answers in their own ways using Indigenous methodology. A self-describing kaupapa Maori community mental health service for adults run by the Auckland District Health Board gives accounts of 'mental disorder' which are indistinguishable from those offered by Western/Northern medical model psychiatrists serving the interests of Big Pharma.
