Initiatives to improve low levels of educational attainment amongst Indigenous students in the Canadian Prairies have long emphasized cultural approaches and ignored how racism affects achievement. Taking up the debates offered by critical race theory, and utilizing post-structural theorizing of knowledge and subjectivities, this article provides a discourse analysis of educators' contradictory deployments of cultural discourses. The analysis highlights the inadequacy of cultural narratives for explaining the inequality experienced by Indigenous students. I show how naming racism in schools is difficult for teachers because cultural integration efforts are taken as evidence that equality is being achieved, and I trace the ways in which this leads to the naturalization of schooling exclusions and unequal subjectivities. Readers are brought to rethink the integration of Indigenous culture in schools as a singular pathway to student success, and the importance of centering race and racism.