The Importance of Whaling in Makah Culture: Self Determination and Cultural Continuity
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Treaties represent initial instances of legal pluralism between Europeans and Indigenous peoples in what is now known as North America; treaty rights are eternal, yet as societal norms change these rights are drawn into question and their strength tested. This paper examines specifically the Makah Nation, located in Washington state, who signed the Treaty of Neah Bay in 1855, which assured them that in exchange for ceding a large portion of their land they would preserve their right to whale (Article IV, Treaty of Neah Bay). In the last 100 years, non-Indigenous norms have shifted from participating in commercial whaling to largely condemning it because of animal rights beliefs often place the rights of whales above many mammals due to their complex social life (Gupta 1741). These changing norms have led to costly court cases for the Makah and have generally changed legislation and regulations for whaling practices which have impeded the Makah's right to whale. Legal Indigenous environmental rights - meaning the rights of Indigenous peoples to decide how to interact with the environment - act as opportunities for Indigenous peoples to exercise their rights to self-determination and are necessary to the cultural survival of Indigenous peoples. However, in an environment of legal pluralism, different bodies can attempt to undermine Indigenous culture and self-determination by arguing animal rights are of greater import; the Makah not only have their right to whale at stake, but the right to cultural continuity.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
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 | 0.003 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.011 | 0.034 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.005 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.006 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 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".