In Australia as in Canada, Indigenous contemporary realities can be approached as locally constituted responses to colonial history and to state policies and agendas. This paper compares the ways two Indigenous groups, former hunters and gatherers, have, since their -˜forced’s settlement, reproduced and transformed their identities and their worlds. The comparison is based on two selected topics: the politics of identity and identification; and local responses to the policies of self-determination/self-management. Considering both Indigenous kin-based socialities and their ontological differences provides clues to a better understanding of Indigenous people’s complex practices of resistance and accommodation to, and engagement with, state agendas and the values of modernity and settler society. The two Indigenous groups selected are the Kukatja, an Aboriginal group in Australia’s Western Desert, and the Atikamekw, an Indian Nation of north-central Quebec.
