Makayla's Decision: The Exercise of Indigenous Rights and the Primacy of Allopathic Medicine in Canada
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Introduction: Makayla Sault and JJIn the middle of January 2015, eleven-year-old Makayla Sault of Ontario's New Credit First Nation died of cancer. A year earlier Makayla had been diagnosed with a rare version of acute lymphoblastic leukemia called positive Philadelphia chromosome. For eleven weeks, Makayla underwent chemotherapy, the severe side-effects of which forced into intensive care. Makayla's mother Sonya Sault described the experience to the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation: It's a mother's worst nightmare. .I remember I just watch and listening to pray, 'Oh God. Come and get me, come and take from here.' She said, 'Mom, [it's] the leukemia but it is the chemo that is going to kill me (Walker, 2014).Eventually Makayla and parents decided to end the chemotherapy. Makayla herself wrote a letter outlining wishes and there were many mediation meetings between hospital staff and Indigenous cultural experts (Garlow, 2015). Yet the family was told by physicians at McMaster Children's Hospital that Makayla would have 100 per cent relapse and she die if discontinued (Walker, 2014). The physicians added that traditional medicine has zero per cent success, according to Sonya Sault (Walker, 2014). Sault told the New Credit Band Council that [Dr. Barr] said to us '...anyone who says that traditional medicine works should be thrown in jail' (Two Row Times, 2014). The hospital then referred the case to the Children's Aid Society, sparking fears that Makayla could be apprehended and removed from family and community.Makayla was deemed capable by the Children's Aid Society and by the courts of making decisions about health; therefore, decision to end chemotherapy stood. But for six weeks, the Sault family lived with the knowledge that they could lose custody of their sick daughter and that she might be forced to receive further chemotherapy against will and the will of parents. The New Credit First Nation chief and council fully supported the Sault family, and hundreds of members of the community formed the Makayla Defence Force, which aimed to protect Makayla should the Children's Aid Society attempt to take her. Said Makayla's mother, . .if that's what it comes down to, they need to be physical. We're going to do what it takes to make sure our daughter is protected (Walker, 2014).On May 21, 2015 it was announced that Makayla remain at home with family (Garlow, 2014). According to the executive director of the Children's Aid Society, Makayla was not in need of protection and we felt their choice to use traditional medicines was within their right (Walker, 2014). As the authorities' decision was announced, a family friend said, All of the grandmas were crying. Sonya was crying and it was just a big weight lifted off shoulders. She's been liv- ing in fear for the last six weeks, thinking that kids were going to be taken from her (Walker, 2014).Makayla's family gave Indigenous treatments -- Ongwehowe Onongwatri: yo - administered by a healer at the Six Nations reserve. They also took Makayla to the Hippocrates Health Institute in Florida, which offers nutrition and other programs aimed at helping people become disease-free (http://hippocratesinst.org/the-institute/about-hippocrates).1 After suffering a stroke early in 2015, Makayla died.Almost concurrently, JJ, another First Nations eleven year old, was the subject of a court case when McMaster Children's Hospital, the same hospital that treated Makyala, went to court seeking an order to continue chemotherapy treatment. McMaster physicians claimed that further chemotherapy give the girl, J.J., a 90% chance of survival.2 JJ's mother, an Indigenous healer from the Six Nations of the Grand River reserve, wanted to replace chemotherapy with Indigenous medicine. The Ontario Court of Justice refused the hospital's request, deferring to the girl's mother as per the family's Aboriginal rights under Section 35 of the Constitution Act (1982). …
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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 | 0.003 | 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 | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| 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".