Teaching English literacy in First Nations Australian communities is bound up with the policy aim of improving the social and economic outcomes of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples and the desire to acknowledge, recognise and respect their unique cultural identities, languages and knowledges. But for English literacy teachers working in these communities, realising these aims is not so straightforward, and they find themselves situated at the nexus of conflicting ideas about education and justice for their students. In this essay, I reveal the ideological work of English and literacy teaching through self-dialogue captured in my research journal over the 2019 school year in a school with a large First Nations Australian student population in the Northern Territory. The essay unfolds chronologically as I narrate selected excerpts from my journal to provide an analytical account of the ideological tensions I experienced in my praxis as an English literacy teacher.