Genealogies of the Land: Aboriginality, Law, and Territory in Vancouver’s Stanley Park
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Between 1998 and 2003, Canadian courts were confronted with two cases that have held significant legal and political consequences for Aboriginal peoples. The cases, R v Gladue (1999) and R v Powley (2003) raised pressing questions about Aboriginal identities and the rights and material resources that follow from legal recognition. In one form or another, these cases have generated important legal, political, and theoretical questions that require some exploration: How has ‘Aboriginality’ been legally constituted within Canadian jurisprudence? In what ways have these racial-legal definitions changed temporally and geographically? And finally, and most importantly, who can legitimately make claims to Aboriginal identities and to the legal rights and material resources that accompany the law’s recognition of difference? In this article, I historically contextualize these contemporary debates around the juridical construction of Aboriginal identities in Canadian jurisprudence. My substantive focus is two trials that took place between 1923 and 1925 and which centered on competing territorial claims to Stanley Park, an urban park in Vancouver, British Columbia. The cases involved eight mixed-race families of Aboriginal and European ancestry who had lived on the land in question for three generations, and whose ancestors had been there since time immemorial. A central question that emerged throughout the juridical and extra-juridical discourse is if these people were ‘Indians’ (or ‘squatters’) and whether they could make territorial claims through Native title. Through these cases I suggest that the current controversies over Aboriginality evident in Gladue and Powley are deeply rooted in colonial legal processes and practices that require some historical analysis. Ultimately, historically grounded questions about the law’s constitution of Indigenous identities may provide us with important insights into the many facets of colonialism and its residual legacies.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.004 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 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 teacher head, 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".