Resituating the ethical gaze: government morality and the local worlds of impoverished Indigenous women
Bibliographic record
Abstract
BACKGROUND: Over generations, government policies have impacted upon the lives of Indigenous peoples of Canada in unique and often devastating ways. In this context, Indigenous women who struggle with poverty, mental illness, trauma and substance abuse are among the most vulnerable, as are Indigenous children involved in child welfare systems. OBJECTIVE: By examining the life history of Wanda, a First Nations woman, this article examines the intergenerational role that government policies play in the lives of impoverished Indigenous women and their families. Questions of moral governance and responsibility and the need for ethical policies are raised. DESIGN: The life narrative presented in this article is part of a larger qualitative research programme that has collected over 100 life histories of Indigenous women with addictions and who have involvement with the child welfare system, as children or adults. Wanda's life story exemplifies the impact of government policies that is characteristic of vulnerable Indigenous women and draws attention to the lack of ethical standards in government policymaking in child welfare, public health and mental health/addictions. RESULTS: The path to recovery for Canadian Indigenous women in need of treatment for co-occurring mental disorders and substance addiction is too frequently characterized by an inadequate and ever shifting continuum of care. For those who feel intimidated, suspicious or have simply given up on seeking supports, a profound invisibility or forgetting of their struggle exists in areas of government policy and programming provision. Living outside the scope of mental health and addiction priorities, they become visible to the human service sector only if they become pregnant, their parenting draws the attention of child and family services (CFS), they need emergency health care, or are in trouble with the law. The intergenerational cycle of substance abuse, mental illness and poverty is commonly associated with child welfare involvement, specifically practices that place the health and well-being of Indigenous children at risk. In order to break this cycle, close attention to implementation of ethically based policies and best practice interventions is required. CONCLUSIONS: From an ethical policy perspective, the focus of government policies and the practices they generate must be first and foremost to ensure that individuals, families and groups are not left worse off than prior to a government policy impacting upon their life. Furthermore, the impact of living a life determined by multiple government policies should not be a story of individual and family devastation, and government policies should not be the most significant determinant of health for any group of people.
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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 | 0.007 | 0.008 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.060 | 0.078 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.011 | 0.006 |
| Open science | 0.003 | 0.014 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.007 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 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".