In response to the long and harmful legacy of extractive research done on Indigenous peoples and the erasure and devaluation of Indigenous knowledge, pedagogy, and lifeways within Western educational settings, many educators and scholars are seeking to implement decolonizing methodologies into research and educational strategies. Utilizing research conducted alongside Cherokee students during an undergraduate/graduate course (2016-2018), this paper explores how the use of Indigenous Rights Education (IRE) in tandem with Indigenous Participatory Action Research (IPAR) provide pathways to navigate the difficult work of engaging with the underlying epistemological tensions that undergird U.S. settler society. In this article, a female Cherokee/EuroAmerican scholar perspective speaks to thematic narratives from student reflections that illustrate the how such approaches provide spaces for raising critical consciousness and decolonizing praxis.