Indigenous Pacific knowledges embody creative modes of expression and sensibilities as meaning–making. Academia, as a Western-oriented institution, however, privileges intellectualisations that favour abstract critical thinking through more objective lenses. As Moana–Pacific–Pasifika researchers, being creatively critical in higher education begins from our Indigenous concepts and creative practices such as poetry. Talanoa mālie provides a worldview of being–knowing–seeing–doing that we inhabit as Tongans within higher education beyond the boundaries of our ancestral fonua or whenua. Our critical autoethnographic reflections as early career academics are woven through and positioned within our wider talatalanoa, which ultimately seeks to defy, disrupt, and deconstruct dominant Western academic tools and practices within the university context in Aotearoa–New Zealand.