‘The depth of the plough’: white settler tautologies and pioneer lies
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This article introduces the concept of the white settler tautology – something that seems true by the very nature of its repetition and logical irrefutability in white settler histories, stories, and laws – to analyze the naturalization of settler colonial topographies and ecologies of Mi’kma’ki (Mi’kmaq/Mi’gmag territory in Atlantic Canada). Settler tautologies such as written Biblical and visual art historical references to oxen and plough clearing lands and Acadian coastal dyke irrigation systems each advance the figure of a pacified, willing Mi’kmaq/Mi’gmag subject. This erases the histories of wilful, resistant, and complex Mi’kmaq/Mi’gmag whose ongoing presence evokes an ongoing settler violence that settlers do not want to see. We argue that white settler tautologies not only provide cyclical rationales to justify white settler nativism to claim originary European ownership of colonized Indigenous lands, but also violently declared evidence of white settler nativism in the name of white settler futurity through the re-interpretation of treaty and kin. We further suggest that the importance of understanding the violence of white settler tautologies, past and present, is that they still help to justify historical and continuous genocidal occupation in Mi’kma’ki since European invasion began in 1604. To reject such tautological logic is to make visible the unbroken presence of resilient and resistant Mi’kmaq/Mi’gmag that white settlers have dispossessed and tried to eliminate for 400 years.
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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 | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.016 | 0.032 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.007 | 0.005 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.005 | 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".