This paper provides students with an opportunity to critically explore Indigenous creative practices, with a view to understanding them through political, formal and cultural contexts. Students will engage scholarly work around the purpose and range of arts in specific Indigenous contexts, the role of arts in trans-Indigenous networks and activism, and the capacity for creative practice as a site and method of research. In order to ground and historicise their own and/ or others' practices, we will spend time tracing the specific historical and cultural contexts (including their origins, conventions, appropriations, modifications and innovations) of some key creative forms. For some students, this paper will introduce them to graduate-level analysis of creative practice forms; for others, the paper will provide a venue for undertaking an existing or new creative practice in the context of critical work about praxis. An important element of the paper will be the studio/ wānanga section in which all students will participate in making or creating art. For their final research assessment, students will have the option to produce a scholarly essay OR to produce a creative output with written exegesis.