"Don't tell me what to do" encountering colonialism in the academy and pushing back with Indigenous autoethnography

As an Aboriginal woman critiquing Australia’s education system as a site of ongoing colonialism, I aim to actively resist the temptation to perform research within Western hegemonic research paradigms, and instead seek ways to disrupt normative research practices with the what, how, and why of research. In this paper, I utilise Indigenous autoethnography as a cultural imperative to ‘walk my talk’, embedding an autoethnographic dataset of reflection, poetry, emotion, and subjective blurting in response to my experiences of colonialism in the academy. Indigenous autoethnography allows a space from which I can expose (and resist) the abnormality of the ‘normal’; fulfil cultural, ethical and relational obligations; and recentre axiology and ontology as a starting place for research. This paper seeks to contribute to the small but growing literature on Indigenous autoethnography, to offer another pathway for Indigenous scholars to follow, as well as illuminate normative research practices for non-Indigenous researchers.