The Dilemma of Indigenous Self-Government in Canada: Indigenous Rights and Canadian Federalism
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract Canada's constitutional distribution of authority between the provinces and federal government leaves no room for Indigenous self-government, but there are increasingly vocal calls for change. Whether Indigenous peoples are acknowledged as one of Canada's founding nations alongside its English and French settlers, or are recognized as distinctive peoples within its multicultural society, these calls affirm Indigenous peoples as sovereign nations deserving of at least some of the powers that the provinces have. The Constitution Act 1982 provides a different mechanism of legal protection for Indigenous peoples, recognizing and affirming already existing Indigenous rights. Canada's Indigenous rights jurisprudence, however, pulls against the sovereignty that underlies federalism. The courts have understood Indigenous rights such that accessing their protections denies to Indigenous peoples the autonomy to define themselves as member nations of Canada's multicultural society. As a normative point, this paper argues that we should embrace constitutional Indigenous rights as a vehicle for Indigenous sovereignty, because it brings federalism and Indigenous rights together as a theoretically coherent foundation for Indigenous self-government in Canada. As a descriptive point, the paper argues that the jurisprudence itself already contains the resources to support a sovereignty-affirming reading of the Constitution's Indigenous rights provisions.
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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 | 0.004 | 0.008 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.011 | 0.014 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.007 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.003 |
| 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".