From Critique to Construction: The Ancestral Institute as a Praxis-Based Model for Decolonial Community Psychology

Disentangling the colonial residues that structure contemporary mental health is a central task for community psychology. Beyond postures of critique, the field requires generative, praxis-based exemplars. This article presents a practice-based analysis of the Ancestral Institute (AI) as a project of epistemic reconstruction: a community-led effort to assemble a coherent psychological framework from Indigenous and diasporic foundations. Tracing AI's evolution (2022–2025), we detail a shift from decolonizing the content of mental health discourse to decolonizing the forms of knowledge exchange. This progression is mapped through AI's expansion from the Caribbean (Puerto Rico) into Central America (Belize), where community-led governance further refined the framework. We propose Ancestral Systems Praxis (ASP) to name AI's synthesis of ritual, storytelling, and embodied practice that is oriented toward survivance, with core commitments in community psychology and psychosocial care. We also analyse the Wateke, arguing its application as participatory action research functions as both inquiry and praxis. Taken together, these features render AI an adaptable, community-grounded approach for moving from critical diagnosis to constructive design, with implications for the evaluation of traditional healing systems, culturally anchored psychosocial treatments and policy.