Strategies of Elimination: “Exempted” Aborigines, “Competent” Indians, and Twentieth-Century Assimilation Policies in Australia and the United States
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Despite their different politics, populations and histories, there are some striking similarities between the indigenous assimilation policies enacted by the United States and Australia. These parallels reveal much about the harsh practicalities behind the rhetoric of humanitarian uplift, civilization and cultural assimilation that existed in these settler nations. This article compares legislation which provided assimilative pathways to Aborigines and Native Americans whom white officials perceived to be acculturated. Some Aboriginal people were offered certificates of “exemption” which freed them from the legal restrictions on Aboriginal people’s movement, place of abode, ability to purchase alcohol, and other controls. Similarly, Native Americans could be awarded a fee patent which declared them “competent.” This patent discontinued government guardianship over them and allowed them to sell, deed, and pay taxes on their lands. I scrutinize the Board that was sent to Oklahoma to examine the Cheyenne and Arapaho for competency in January and February 1917, and the New South Wales Aborigines’ Welfare Board, which combined the awarding of exemption certificates with their efforts to assimilate Koori people into Australian society in the 1940s and 1950s. These case studies reveal that people of mixed white/indigenous descent were more likely to be declared competent or exempt. Thus, hand in hand with efforts to culturally assimilate Aborigines and Native Americans came attempts to reduce the size of indigenous populations and their landholdings by releasing people of mixed descent from government control, and no longer officially recognizing their indigenous identity.
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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 | 0.005 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.020 | 0.020 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.010 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.005 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 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".