“The Same Force, Authority, and Effect”: Formalizing Native Property and British Plurality in Lower Canada
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In 1790s Lower Canada, British officials pursued a pluralist land tenure policy, establishing new Loyalist freehold townships while allowing the French seigneurial estate system to continue. The extension of French land tenure into the British era also made the status of Native land highly ambiguous. This was a legacy of Jesuit mission involvement with Native villages in the St Lawrence Valley, and of the fluidity of indigenous landholding within French land tenure in general. This case study of two Abenaki Indian places in 1790s Lower Canada demonstrates some unexpected British responses to these complexities. Scholars typically emphasize British colonial desires for consistent, coherent land tenure in general, and preference for freehold land tenure in particular. Yet in their treatment of Abenaki land, British authorities sustained French ambiguities and even created a new anomaly in their own township system. Rather than masking these varieties, British surveyors chose to display the uncertainty, plurality, and anomaly of Native land tenure on the maps they made of Abenaki land.
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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 | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.042 | 0.029 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.008 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.005 | 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".