More or Less Human: Colonialism, Common Law, and the Social Construction of Humanity on Vancouver Island, 1849-1864
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This Article contributes to contemporary debates about juridical personhood by providing an historical account of early contests over who counted as a legal subject in the colony of Vancouver Island. These early contests were critical to the production of racial categories and racial knowledge that remain relevant today, especially for Indigenous people. Using both primary and secondary sources, the Article engages legal, historical, and Indigenous legal studies scholarship to make several points. First, the construction of early liberal legal categories — Indian, corporation, alien and citizen, for example — was accomplished, in part, through practices of humanization and dehumanization. Second, then-governor of the colony, James Douglas, both exemplified and shaped early iterations of these practices. These practices make clear that, unlike colonial administrators who followed, Douglas viewed Indigenous people as human legal subjects. But while Douglas is sometimes valorized for having recognized Aboriginal title in unceded land and acknowledged the capacity of Indigenous people to enter contracts, the underlying assumption that Indigenous people were in fact human, or at least potentially human, does not reveal a robust and nuanced view of humanity, nor was it especially progressive except in contrast to the even more discriminatory views of others. Finally and most importantly, Douglas’s views would not have resonated with Coast Salish understandings of what it meant to be human. This Article concludes by suggesting some implications of this disconnect for both ongoing struggles and the project of reconciliation in Canada.
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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 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.024 | 0.020 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 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".