["The Australian Journal of Anthropology, EarlyView. ", "\nAbstract\nThis article examines the constitution of marlpa identity in the Pilbara, emphasising the interplay between Aboriginal ontologies, kinship systems and the institutional frameworks of native title. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork and oral histories, it argues that marlpa belonging is constituted through cognatic descent, consubstantial relations with Country and the lived enactment of ancestral law. Identity is neither static nor externally imposed; it is an embodied, relational and cosmologically grounded process enacted through ritual, storytelling and obligations to kin and Country. The native title industry, by privileging documentary and genealogical evidence, often generates dissonance with these locally situated epistemologies, producing what can be conceptualised as a cleft habitus: an embodied negotiation between cosmological knowledge and juridical exigencies. This tension illuminates how Aboriginal identity is both constrained by legal frameworks and generative of novel forms of agency, ethical reasoning and cultural continuity. Centring marlpa perspectives, the article contributes to broader debates on Aboriginal personhood, legal pluralism and the epistemic mediation of belonging within settler‐colonial governance. It underscores the resilience, creativity and ethical sophistication inherent in contemporary Aboriginal identity‐making, demonstrating how cosmologically and relationally grounded frameworks of selfhood persist alongside, and in negotiation with, colonial legal apparatuses.\n"]