Marginalised Indigenous communities often have distinct education goals that differ from those of the majority colonising group. These goals may include a focus on revitalising and illuminating their Indigenous language, culture, and practices. The majority power deals with this issue on a continuum, from either ignoring the Indigenous groups’ education goals to enabling Indigenous groups to design and develop curricula that reflect their aspirations. Even when it is the latter, designing a mathematics curriculum for Indigenous communities and languages presents several unique challenges. In this paper, we explore these challenges, focusing on initial teacher education as it serves as the foundation for preparing individuals to become effective and competent mathematics educators in Indigenous schools. We also explore how the Cultural Symmetry Model helps overcome some of the challenges and provides a strategy for a Māori-medium initial teacher education program to create mathematics activities to support the indigenisation of the curriculum. We provide an example of the work with spatial orientation, an important component in the New Zealand mathematics curriculum, to examine how indigenising could occur. Traditional wayfaring narratives, as a form of spatial orientation, provide opportunities for preservice teachers to explore how to include the invisible aspects of culture, such as values, which contribute to meaning-making. The Cultural Symmetry Model and the incorporation of wayfaring narratives emerged as effective strategies, fostering the development of preservice teachers’ social and academic language, particularly for those who are adult learners of Māori. The study emphasises the importance of reconnecting with traditional knowledge embedded in cultural narratives, providing insights into the positive contributions of cultural artefacts to mathematics learning and the potential for developing a strong mathematics identity among preservice teachers in Māori-medium schools