Spinning wheels: Surmounting the Indian Act’s impact on traditional Indigenous governance
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract Prior to European settlement, First Nations governance systems were centered on extended families organized by clans. Traditional kin‐based leadership selection practices, combined with consensus decision‐making, ensured that all clans were equally represented and participated in governance. This article discusses findings from dissertation research on First Nations governance in Western Canada. It examines how contemporary First Nations governments, despite enduring ongoing legacies of colonization and operating under the Indian Act, a law that does not support good democratic governance, have worked to achieve effective governance. For this article, findings related to the Indian Act’s impact on traditional clan‐based systems of First Nations governance will be discussed: particularly, the ways Indian Act elections perpetuate nepotism and maintain the political status quo, creating a culture of spinning wheels that makes it difficult to maintain change.
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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 | 0.007 | 0.019 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.024 | 0.032 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.011 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.010 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 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".