National calls for truth-telling in Australia have renewed attention to the responsibilities of educators in confronting colonial violence and developing historically informed, relational approaches to teaching. This paper draws on data from a two‑year study of capacity‑building for discomfort within an Initial Teacher Education (ITE) programme that directly engages with Australia’s colonial histories. Grounded in scholarship on difficult knowledge and pedagogies of discomfort (Britzman, 1998; Boler, 1999; Zembylas, 2015), the study examines how non-Indigenous pre‑service teachers navigate the affective, ethical, and relational demands of learning about Indigenous histories of dispossession, violence, and ongoing settler colonialism. Indigenous scholars such as Martin and Mirraboopa (2003) describe Indigenous ontologies as fundamentally relational, emphasising interconnectedness, reciprocal responsibility, and ethical modes of being with the land and with one another. For learners raised within Western epistemic traditions, characterised by binaries, hierarchy, and separation, the encounter with relational worldviews can provoke both discomfort and affective disruption. Experiences from the classroom illustrate how such disruptions compel students to rethink inherited assumptions about knowledge, selfhood, and their implication in colonial histories. Yet these moments of discomfort often surface anxieties about what action is possible: pre‑service teachers frequently ask, “What do I do with this?”, revealing concerns that learning about colonial violence risks collapsing into paralysis or guilt. Drawing on TallBear’s (2019) conceptualisation of “good relations,” the study positions truth‑telling as an ongoing ethical practice through which students are supported to witness historical and contemporary harms, recognise their entanglement in colonial structures, and commit to more respectful, accountable ways of being in relation to Indigenous histories. Within this framework, discomfort becomes not a barrier but a necessary condition for re‑orienting ontologies, unsettling worldviews, and cultivating the relational sensibilities essential to reconciliation and decolonial futures. The paper calls for pedagogical approaches in ITE that honour Indigenous relational epistemologies and support educators to enter, remain in, and act from within the challenging but transformative possibilities of truth‑telling.

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