When tribalism meets liberalism: Human rights and Indigenous boundary problems in Canada
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This article draws on debates about the ‘boundary problem’ in democratic theory to consider the normative challenges raised by descent-based Aboriginal membership rules in Canada. The boundary paradox is one of the most intractable puzzles of democratic theory. If a demos is necessarily bounded, so that some people are excluded, what normative principle could justify these exclusions? Liberal theory tends to insist on the primacy of consent as the basis of political society and so fails to explain the reliance of liberal democracies on birthright membership, especially the distribution of citizenship to foreign-born descendants of citizens. Applied to expressly kinship-based polities like Aboriginal communities, liberal approaches prioritize non-discrimination, potentially denying to those communities the capacity to distribute membership by reference to characteristics listed as ‘prohibited grounds’ in human rights law, including, most problematically, race and ethnicity. The article outlines the parallels between Canadian citizenship law, the Indian Act regime, and First Nations’ membership codes, and examines the distinctive role to be played by section 35 of Canada’s Constitution Act 1982 in tempering non-discrimination logics. It concludes that existing justificatory tests (the ‘valid legislative object’ test, and the section 1 ‘reasonable limits’ test) are unlikely to provide a way forward, but that a promising methodology can be discerned in Canadian law and policy, in which the ‘reasonableness’ of Aboriginal descent–based exclusions is assessed relative to the characteristics of a free and democratic Aboriginal community. I suggest that this adaptation of liberal non-discrimination norms is an expression of the continuing importance of kinship and descent boundaries in settler-state constitutionalism. Although many questions remain to be resolved, Canadian human rights laws and methodologies could assist in the primary challenge posed to settler-state political theory: the reconciliation of tribal and liberal forms of political organization.
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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 | 0.008 | 0.021 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.063 | 0.053 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.021 | 0.008 |
| Open science | 0.004 | 0.011 |
| Research integrity | 0.007 | 0.013 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.010 | 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".