This paper focuses upon how we as a research team drew upon what Wendy Brady (1992), Lester Irabinna Rigney (1999, and Karen Martin (2008) variously have described as “Indigenist” research traditions or practices. Indigenist research is a term made popular in Australian Indigenous research literature by Rigney (1999), who proposed that Indigenist research approaches would be grounded in Indigenous standpoint and knowledges, would privilege the voices of Indigenous peoples, and would be unashamedly political. We drew connections between these Indigenist research traditions, Indigenous standpoint, and cultural interface theory (Nakata, 2007a, 2007b) and tenets of critical race theory (Ladson-Billings, 1998; Milner, 2007) emerging from Black scholarship in the USA. We did this to align the theory-method coherence of a university learning and teaching project to support the praxis of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander, or Indigenous, pre-service teachers on their final practicums and internships prior to graduating. We employed a phenomenological approach guided by Brown and Gilligan (1992) and Van Manen (2007), shaped by core Indigenist principles of “yarning” (Bessarab & Ng'andu, 2010; Fredericks, 2007) which privileged Indigenous peoples’ narratives and voices through facilitated dialogue, particularly in assessment cycles with practicum supervising teachers. We explain our positioning as Islander and non-Indigenous researchers and how we are connected to the field of pedagogy and praxis. We explain how we saw our research roles in what Kemmis and colleagues (2014) have described as “risky times” for education—an era of neo-managerialism in schooling and university education (Wrigley, Lingard & Thompson, 2012) as well as an ongoing, colonising experience for Indigenous university students. The attention to the onto-epistemological requirements of an Indigenist approach enabled us to amplify the perspectives and voices of Indigenous students against the backdrop of Australian tertiary education where White, hegemonic social-political and cultural-discursive relations (Kemmis et al., 2014) often constrain their potential achievement on practicum in socially unjust and often racist ways. We conclude with key points for educational researchers, highlighting that research is a practice and has practice architectures with particular, hegemonic arrangements which have not transpired to serve the interests of Indigenous peoples. Honouring Indigenist standpoint and employing critical race theory in research design thus means paying particular and careful attention to the work that research practices do, on, to, and with communities, not only the seemingly uninvested, or detached, or “logical” (cf. Gordon, 2000) crafting of the praxis research problem.

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