In this book, Peter Kulchyski explores the politics of three settlements in the former Northwest Territories of Canada, leading to a discussion of relations among internal communities and between those social groups and the state. The accounts consist of a string of personal stories taken from Kulchyski's long experiences with these communities, and the form of the text, one suspects, mirrors the politics: just as one of Kulchyski's theses is that "in Aboriginal self-government, the politics of form is of considerable importance" (15), the form of this text is also of considerable importance. This is emphasized by Kulchyski's connections between social institutions and different forms of writing; he regards the state "as a certain kind of writing" (17). The state is also defined as totalizing agent, and therefore Kulchyski sees "the establishment of communities that deserve the name, " i.e., the native response toward self-government, as a form of resistance (17), not just against the state per se, but against the state as an imported, abstract concept.