This chapter is a love letter to our former selves, and to those who follow us into the colonial institution that is the academy. Drawing on lived experience, cultural knowledge, and hard-earned wisdom, we shed light on the often-unspoken challenges faced by Indigenous scholars navigating higher education in Australia. Through storying, a culturally grounded, critical methodological approach, we reflect on the violence, manipulation, and systemic barriers we endured, wrangled and jumped, as well as the resilience, community, and thrivance we cultivated in response. We critically examine white allyship, academic gatekeeping, and the extraction of Indigenous Knowledges, and offer some guidance on how to survive and thrive without assimilation. It is our hope that our writing disrupts the dominant narrative by centering Indigenous ways of knowing, being, and doing, and calls for relational, reciprocal, and sovereign academic practice. This work is both a refusal and a reclamation of voice, of power, and of our collective future in the academy and beyond.