Indigenous populations are over-represented in criminal statistics in most developed nations. This has been related to biological and inherited neurocognitive factors. The question needs to be raised as to whether the association is genetic or epigenetic (in the widest sense). In fact, we need to broaden the subject in studying human psychological and psychiatric dysfunction. When we do so, some important factors in personal and psycho-social dysfunction come into view. These include those contributed to by individual differences, socioeconomic variables, cultural alienation, disruption of identity formation and its sites, and in short the partial disruption or loss of ‘the village needed to raise a child’. In some post-colonial settings these factors are slowly and incrementally being addressed, but people who are casualties of the varying difficulties and traumatic complexities emerge for society to deal with. That sociopolitical response deserves a corresponding effort by academia to provide the research and argument that illuminates the subject and their formation in a post-colonial world. The present discussion aims to do that conceptual, scientific, and ethical work which developed and recognised academia owes to the Indigenous people and cultures that have suffered disruption in the names of ‘civilisation’ and ‘enlightenment’.