Yumalundi and welcome to the Indigenous Wellbeing Conference 2026

This topic explores how Indigenous communities are leading climate adaptation, disaster response, and long-term stewardship of Country through cultural knowledge, governance, and innovation. It recognises climate change as a wellbeing issue shaping housing, food and water security, cultural continuity, and intergenerational responsibility. Sessions highlight Indigenous-led approaches to planning, policy, and care for Country that draw on ancestral knowledge while building contemporary capability, centring strength, leadership, and continuity in climate-resilient futures.

This topic examines the cumulative harms across health, justice, education, and child protection systems, and why decades of reform have failed to deliver meaningful change. Moving beyond surface level cultural safety, it focuses on accountability, safe truth-telling, and what repair looks like in practice. Sessions explore how systems can shift from consultation to responsibility, and from intent to measurable outcomes.

Many Indigenous communities and workers carry unsustainable emotional and cultural loads. This topic shifts the focus from survival to sustainability by addressing burnout, workforce wellbeing, and the need for trauma-aware systems rather than trauma-aware individuals. It centres collective care, rest, joy, and regeneration as essential foundations for long-term social and emotional wellbeing.

This topic focuses on how Indigenous models of care are embedded, scaled, and sustained within real-world systems while protecting cultural integrity and authority. It explores challenges related to funding, commissioning, accountability, and workforce sustainability as models move beyond pilots. Sessions examine how Indigenous ownership, governance, and Indigenous-defined measures of success support longevity and impact, and how cultural authority can be maintained as reach expands. 

This topic challenges consultation models that extract Indigenous knowledge while institutions retain control. It examines how decision-making authority can shift from governments and organisations back to Indigenous communities through consent, refusal, and veto as legitimate outcomes. Sessions address consultation fatigue, extractive co-design, and the importance of community-led timelines and priorities, centring participation defined by authority and control, not presence alone.

This topic explores how Indigenous self-determination is exercised through Indigenous LORE, community governance, and engagement with statutory law and human rights frameworks. It examines the relationship and tension between cultural authority and state-based legal systems, and how rights are upheld or constrained in everyday settings such as health, justice, land management, and child protection. Sessions focus on community-led governance beyond legislation and sustaining momentum without exhausting communities through constant advocacy.

This topic reframes education as an Indigenous-led pathway to influence, leadership, and collective decision-making. It explores intergenerational learning, youth voice with care and consent, and education as a space for truth-telling, accountability, and repair. Sessions challenge checklist approaches to cultural safety and examine how education systems, under Indigenous guidance, can support agency, purpose, and long-term wellbeing.

This topic moves the conversation from economic participation to ownership, control, and collective wealth. It explores Indigenous-led economic models grounded in culture and values, including procurement, supply chains, entrepreneurship, and digital enterprise. Sessions highlight how economic futures can strengthen community wellbeing when they prioritise sovereignty, sustainability, and shared prosperity over growth alone.

This topic positions culture as foundational infrastructure for wellbeing, prevention, and continuity across generations. It explores how arts, storytelling, language, ceremony, and collective memory function as living systems of care, strengthening identity and belonging across Elders, adults, rangatahi or taiohi, and tamariki. Sessions highlight intergenerational models that transmit knowledge and cultural authority, and examine how Indigenous cultural and intellectual property is protected from misuse, misappropriation, and commodification across systems.

This topic creates space to imagine Indigenous futures not limited by broken systems or inherited constraints. It centres Indigenous-led visions grounded in refusal, redesign, and radical imagination, asking what wellbeing systems and narratives might look like if built from Indigenous worldviews from the ground up. Sessions focus on strengthening Indigenous authority over future-making, including control of data, knowledge systems, technology, and narrative framing, to protect intellectual property and disrupt deficit narratives.

This topic focuses on how Indigenous knowledges, relationships, and place-based practices prevent mental distress long before crisis or diagnosis. It explores primary prevention designed and led by Indigenous communities, centring culture, land, language, collective responsibility, and social determinants of wellbeing. Sessions highlight how whānau, hapū, iwi, Pacific peoples, and other Indigenous communities are shifting systems upstream into everyday settings, and how investment, measures of success, and workforce roles can be reoriented toward prevention grounded in Indigenous worldviews.