The Importance of Oral and Extrinsic Historical Evidence in Understanding Indian Treaties
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In recent years, the Courts have instructed Canadians about the importance of oral testimony and other extrinsic historical evidence in providing context and insight into the meaning and interpretation of Indian treaties. The author reviews three books that explore how this genre of historical information assists both Native peoples and non-Natives in gaining a better understanding of Treaty No. 7 in southern Alberta, as well as the importance of the six numbered Indian treaties in Saskatchewan. This article also examines the courtroom role of historians and the creative use of extrinsic documentation in the Supreme Court of Canada trial of Donald Marshall Jr. in which senior justices breathed new life and substance into the Maritime Peace and Friendship Treaties. The author advises archivists and historians of an increased burden on their activities, as oral testimony and other types of extrinsic evidence will be used increasingly by adjudicative bodies to provide a modern interpretation to provisions of Indian treaties. This judicial activism has had, and will continue to have, a significant impact on the Canadian polity.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.006 | 0.015 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.007 | 0.007 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.012 | 0.042 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.022 | 0.010 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.009 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.005 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".