ABSTRACT
Before it finishes, this chapter ends up as a short summary of a rather long research undertaking aimed at detailing the different procedural means exploited by culturally mainstream and Aboriginal (or “First Nations”1) youth in their efforts to understand their own and others’, personal persistence or “self-continuity” in the face of those wholesale personal changes that time and development inevitably hold in store. What was it, we wanted to know from each of them, that, “in the contemplation of their lives, links the parts to the whole” (Dilthey, 1962, p. 201)? Before coming to an account of their diverse answers to such questions, however, it is important to first attempt to get clear about what we, as well as a whole graveyard full of intellectual ancestors, have intended by the notion personal persistence, and why understanding oneself and others as somehow continuous in time has so regularly been held out as both a constitutive condition for selfhood and as a prerequisite to the maintenance of any sort of moral order.
