As psychology becomes increasingly appropriated by the sciences, and less characterized by the experiential descriptors of allegory and metaphor, practitioners of arts in health settings face a challenge.Many therapeutic arts organizations have responded by sponsoring controlled experiments in search of quantifiable evidence upon which to base arguments for the therapeutic efficacy of artistic practice. Others continue to rely upon a proliferate intuition that creativity and artistic participation are intrinsically beneficial to health.Meanwhile, funding for artistically orientated therapeutic interventions is scarce as programs of prescriptive psychoeducation descendant from the cognitive and behavioural traditions dominate the psychotherapeutic landscape.In fear of exclusion, many arts therapists anxiously attempt to translate their working methods into the language of these clinical modalities.Yet there is a sizeable price to pay for any recognition that may follow. For dance therapy, drama therapy, and music therapy have subsequently ceased to evolve a subject-specific language pertinent to their proprietary process, as they struggle to explain creativity through scientificity.The language of psychological science, which many healing artists are coerced to adopt, represents only one way of understanding how we hurt and how we heal.This knowledge descends from the attitudes and priorities of wealthy western colonial culture, which often devalues and patronizes the indigenous psychologies of surviving traditional communities.Such societies have in common inviolate regard for the role of artistic practice in sustaining individual and collective health.Furthermore, they preserve a conceptual and linguistic framework with which to depict and express the healing function of the arts.Thereby, rather than borrowing terms from the psychology of western modern science, therapeutic arts practitioners may better protect their position and integrity by aligning them