For the better part of two decades, the author and his research colleagues have been engaged in a broad program of research aimed at identifying certain of the "social determinants of health and wellbeing" common to Canadian First Nation, Metis, and Inuit youth. The present account samples from these ongoing research efforts by recapping two sets of findings that set various markers of educational success in relation to both: (a) the troubled matter of "ethnic-identification" among Aboriginal youth; and (b) the presence or absence of various community-level markers of "cultural continuity" in B.C.'s First Nations bands. These few out-takes from their larger program of research hopefully serve to help make the points that (a) any effort to simply sum across the radical differences that divide one Aboriginal community from the next will likely result in some misleading banner headline--some claim that is, at best, an "actuarial fiction"; and (b) those First Nations communities that have met with greater success in linking to and celebrating their cultural past, and in re-establishing community control of their own cultural future, also provide their children with the gift of substantially greater levels of academic success. (Contains 5 notes.)