This article analyses how contemporary framings of resilience policies exude forms of neo-colonial governance and subjectivities grounded in modernist ideologies and ways of ‘being’. Often seen as vulnerable and victims of climate change, Indigenous peoples have become targets for the making of resilience projects—aimed at securing and enhancing life itself. Indigenous people’s knowledge, care and relational entanglements with nature and spaces have become attractive in climate science. Their epistemologies and ontologies of being rest upon deep understandings of natural ecologies rooted in culture, co-existence, and cosmologies of environmental management (Chandler, 2024). Despite these, local communities and Indigenous peoples are barely recognised in resilience policy design, and interventions focus ‘almost exclusively on Eurocentric canonised modes of knowledge production’(Amo-Agyemang 2021, 3). Thus, while assuming universalist one-size-fits-all solutions rather than pluralistic diversity, extant resilience projects preclude the co-production of Indigenous people’s knowledge and alternatively fundamental worlds and systems of power. Drawing from a Decolonising Resilience workshop and excerpts from my PhD fieldwork, I argue that this persists, in part, because of modernist systems of neo-coloniality embedded within discourses of resilience. Neo-coloniality, in this discursive sense, is deployed to expose the ongoing effects of colonisation.