Seals, Selfies, and the Settler State: Indigenous Motherhood and Gendered Violence in Canada
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
From residential schools and sterilizations to assimilation-driven adoption and foster care abuses, settler colonialism targets Indigenous women in their roles as the reproducers of Indigenous cultures and nations, deeming them unfit and meeting them with violence. Such policies, both historical and contemporary, fuel and inform ongoing attacks on Indigenous motherhood. In this essay, I analyze the brutality leveled against famed Inuk throat singer Tanya Tagaq by settler environmentalists in 2014 after she posted online a photograph of her infant daughter next to a dead seal in solidarity with the pro–seal hunt Indigenous activist "Sealfie" campaign, as a primary example of this violence. I argue that the attacks on Tagaq in her positions as an Indigenous mother, activist, and celebrity showcase an unbroken onslaught of gendered violence coordinated by the settler states and its agents and serving assimilationist efforts through the current moment. I conclude with a discussion of how a focus on attacks on Indigenous motherhood, an understudied aspect of gendered violence against Indigenous women, can provide new insights into the Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women tragedy and Canadian state efforts to redress it.
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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 | 0.001 | 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 | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| 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 it