“Plus Ten Percent for Forcible Taking:” Construction of the St. Lawrence Seaway as Environmental Racism on Kahnawà:ke
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The construction of massive economic-development projects disproportionately impact Indigenous communities in what is now Canada, and is defined by Melissa Checker as environmental racism. This paper explores the imposition process of the St. Lawrence Seaway on the Kanien’kehá:ka community of Caughnawaga, Quebec. The colonial relationship Glen Coulthard describes is used to frame the power dynamics between the state and the community of Caughnawaga in the conception, construction, and compensation phases of the St. Lawrence Seaway. The initial location of the Seaway was on the southern part of the island of Montreal, though shifted on Caughnawaga in future development interests of the city, as uncovered by a draft report completed by Joan Holmes and Associates in 1999. The cabinet conclusions from the Parliament of Canada between 1955 and 1956 discussed concern of legality surrounding the expropriation of reserve land. Ministers declared the legal incongruity could be resolved with amending the St. Lawrence Seaway Authority Act to define the St. Lawrence Seaway Authority as a corporation. The amendment allowed for the Authority to forcibly take lands within Caughnawaga via Section 35 of the Indian Act, removing non-consenting families from their homes. The oral history accounts conducted by Kahnawà:ke community members Stephanie K. Phillips and Dwayne Stacey emphasized the unjust nature of the Seaway. Joan Holmes and Associates confirmed lack of notification of the expropriation to Caughnawaga, often following the actions, and compensation was insufficient when able to compare to private appraisers.
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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 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.031 | 0.022 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.007 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.006 | 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".