Desire over damage: Epistemological shifts and anticolonial praxis from an indigenous-led community health project.

This article offers an overview of an Indigenous-led participatory research project, The Future We Dream, co-developed by rural land defenders in Central America and the Caribbean. To engage in recent dialectics concerning complicity and decolonising methodologies, we centre Indigenous Maya conceptions of health, wellbeing and what 'living well' means to community members. For context, The Future We Dream responds to the 2015 landmark ruling made by the Caribbean Court of Justice affirming the land rights of the Maya people of Southern Belize. Amidst tensions with the state that followed the ruling, an autonomous movement composed of grassroots organisers turned their attention towards imagining and constructing a self-determined future. In turn, the communities initiated a research exercise inspired by desire-based methodologies (Tuck, 2009) to articulate a collective vision of a healthful Maya future outside of colonial-liberal worldviews, and notably, formulating Maya visions of healthful, sustainable worlds. In reporting on this one example of grassroots, anticolonial health research that departs from the hierarchal knowledge production practices of liberal academia, this paper details the collaborative process/project; the complexities/complicities of research involving Indigenous communities; and how Indigenous epistemologies are generative vis-a-vis unsettling conventional knowledge production practices in the contentious field of global health research.