Religious Freedom in the New World? Indigenous Sacred Sites and Religious Beliefs in the Courts in British Columbia
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The process of colonization in British Columbia and Canada included the use of law and policy to suppress indigenous religious belief and practice, with devastating effects on indigenous communities. Today indigenous people are revitalizing their cultures, and seeking legal protection for their sacred places and religious beliefs. The Supreme Court of Canada has directed governments to take steps to protect and preserve indigenous cultures and ways of life. The national Truth and Reconciliation Commission brought to light the mechanisms of religious intolerance against indigenous people and issued ninety-four calls to action. And the United Nations and other inter and transnational bodies have developed soft law instruments for the protection of sacred sites and religious diversity. So far, however, the lower courts and political institutions in British Columbia have been reluctant to change the status quo. The present paper surveys the lower court reasons rejecting indigenous claims, and points to some of the underlying historical legacies, cultural attitudes, evidentiary and procedural obstacles, and economic rationales that inform those reasons. Four emerging trends that may help indigenous people move the law towards greater protection of their sacred sites and religious beliefs are identified and discussed. In doing so, the paper also touches on broader topics, including for example the legal treatment of religious minorities within States; the limits on religious freedom in constitutional democracies; the apparent conflict between economic priorities and the protection of cultural sites; and the relationship between international and domestic law on the protection of religious and cultural diversity.
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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 | 0.001 | 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 | 0.023 | 0.010 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.009 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.005 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.008 | 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".