This article discusses a research project in which curriculum mathematics education in an Indigenous Maori school in Aotearoa/New Zealand was conceptualised as a site of struggle. A bricolage of concepts from the sociology of education and Maori knowledge was used to interpret ethnographic data from this school. Findings suggest that struggle derives from two conflicting ontological commitments about the nature of a person. Curriculum mathematics education carried with it a commitment to the person as a collection of official knowledge and associated interactional modes. The ethos of the school carried a commitment to the person as genealogically embedded unique being. Centring Maori ontological commitments. knowledge and people as the source of legitimation suggests the possibility that such schools could use Indigenous ontologies and their associated epistemologies to generate their own terms of engagement with, and Indigenous knowledge of, the discipline of mathematics itself.