Self-Determination and Cultural Continuity Among Naga Tribal Students: Navigating Intergenerational Narratives of Conflict, Trauma and Future Aspirations


This paper examines intergenerational dialogue among Naga tribal students from Nagaland, Northeast India who migrate to metropolitan cities for higher education. The Naga peoples comprise Indigenous tribes, with seventeen major tribes officially recognised within the state of Nagaland, each with distinct languages, customary governance systems, and cultural institutions. Decades of armed conflict, political uncertainty, and life under the Armed Forces Special Powers Act (AFSPA) have produced a distinctive culture of intergenerational narrative transmission, in which the historical experiences of one generation shape the perceptions and expectations of the next. The study investigates how that transmission travels with students to urban centres such as Bangalore and Delhi, and how the encounter between inherited understanding and lived experience generates ongoing processes of negotiation, reinterpretation, and forward-looking agency. The study uses Indigenous psychology methodologies with forty-four participants: individual semi-structured interviews with thirty-two Naga students and tribal student union leaders in Bangalore and Delhi, six student-only talking circles drawn from that group, and four mixed intergenerational talking circles in which students sat with twelve elders. Member checking was conducted in two phases and reflexive journalling throughout. Participants were drawn from multiple Naga tribes and span a range of academic levels and migration trajectories across both cities. The analysis draws on Self-Determination Theory, reoriented through Indigenous relational frameworks, to trace how the three basic psychological needs of autonomy, competence, and relatedness are renegotiated across contexts. Four interrelated processes emerge from the findings: the negotiation of inherited conflict narratives against lived encounter; the emergence of tribal student unions as dialogical infrastructures performing a function strikingly analogous to that of the traditional Morung; the reconfiguration of self-determination from deferred political aspiration to present-oriented collective agency; and the cultivation of narrative sovereignty as psychological and cultural self-determination.

Imlingangzuk Longkumer

PhD Research Scholar at the School of Psychological Sciences, CHRIST University, Bangalore, India

Imlingangzuk Longkumer is a PhD Research Scholar at the School of Psychological Sciences, CHRIST University, Bangalore, India. He is a recipient of the Indian Council of Social Science Research (ICSSR) Doctoral Fellowship. His broader research interests lie in bridging mainstream psychological frameworks with Indigenous knowledge systems, contributing to the development of culturally grounded and inclusive approaches in higher education and psychological research.

Lijo Thomas

Director and Dean at CHRIST University, Pune Lavasa Campus, India, and an Associate Professor in the Department of Business and Management

Dr Lijo Thomas is Director and Dean at CHRIST University, Pune Lavasa Campus, India, and an Associate Professor in the Department of Business and Management. His work focuses on community engagement, service-learning, and socially responsive higher education. He is the Founder and Director of DREAMS, a community-university collaborative service-learning initiative implemented across the United States, Germany, and India. He also founded the Let Us Dream Community Conference, which brings together diverse community-based initiatives and higher education institutions to foster sustainable social impact. His work reflects a sustained commitment to bridging academic knowledge and community practice. ORCID: 0000-0002-2114-7218.