This paper traces how discourse functions in the context of a school-based, urban Aboriginal education initiative, with a focus on the construction and organization of teaching subjects. Critical discourse analysis that traces spectres discloses some of the ways that whiteness and Eurocentrism generate the possibilities for, and the conditions in which teachers take up, the positions: victim of racism, arbiter of authenticity, and rescuer. Consideration of the multiple, intricate, and shifting positions teachers occupy within whiteness in general, and in colonial systems of education in particular, presents unique possibilities when untangling and reconfiguring teachers' constructions of Aboriginality/Indigeneity and responses to Aboriginal/Indigenous education. This theory building also contributes to the larger field of curriculum studies by showing how consideration of ‘unheroic tales’ can help in theorizing teacher identity and difference, both within and beyond the markers Indigenous/non-Indigenous.