Postgraduate research is complex enough, but Indigenous students face unique challenges and additional expectations. For instance, they are often strongly motivated for their tertiary education to support their community's aspirations but distanced from those communities. We are wahine (women) Maori researchers working to restore various local, natural environments in alignment with our iwi/hapu (tribe/subtribe) interests. We all gained funding to support this work through contestable postgraduate scholarships or research revenue, enjoying a high level of autonomy to design projects, under incentives designed to support Maori capability and potential. Using digital collective autoethnography, we reflected upon and articulated how our iwi/hapu and whanau (family) aspirations shaped our study and research, and how university and external research funding supported these pursuits. Through these narratives, we highlight the driving influence of "iwi/community aspirations," consider how universities and the research sector currently "align" with these, identify "barriers," and finally discuss what "deep tautoko (support)" looks like. We also reflect on how our postgraduate experiences and learnings have influenced and guided our subsequent work. Our collective experiences encompass potentially transformative approaches in community-driven, publicly funded, tertiary research; so, we finish by identifying specific mechanisms that could amplify these approaches.