Reviving Traditional Institutional Systems as a Strategy for Women’s Empowerment, Mental Health, and Cultural Continuity

This article examines the revival of Tsuki, the traditional women-centred dormitory institution of the Ao-Naga community, as a culturally grounded framework for women’s empowerment, psychosocial well-being, and cultural continuity. Historically, Tsuki functioned as an Indigenous pedagogical and relational institution through which young women were socialized into communal ethics, moral discipline, intergenerational responsibility, and collective identity. The decline of Tsuki under colonial administration, missionary expansion, formal education, and modernization disrupted Indigenous systems of mentorship, communal learning, and women-centred institutional authority. The study adopts a qualitative, theoretically informed Participatory Action Research (PAR) approach drawing on oral histories, narrative interviews, collective storytelling, participatory discussions, and community reflections involving former Tsukirs, elders, women and men who witnessed the institution, and descendants of former inmates. Rather than presenting generalized empirical claims, the article interprets participant narratives to examine the continuing social, psychological, and cultural relevance of Tsuki within contemporary Ao-Naga society. Drawing on Indigenous feminism, decolonial theory, and educational and community psychology, the article argues that reviving Tsuki represents a process of institutional decolonization, epistemic recovery, and adaptive cultural reconstruction. The findings indicate that participants viewed Tsuki as a structured environment of mentorship, psychosocial support, peer solidarity, identity formation, and intergenerational learning that historically strengthened women’s agency, communal belonging, and emotional resilience. The article concludes that reviving Tsuki should not be understood as nostalgic preservationism, but as a contemporary strategy for negotiating cultural continuity, gender transformation, psychosocial wellbeing, and Indigenous knowledge systems within rapidly changing social contexts.