‘The depth of the plough’: white settler tautologies and pioneer lies
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
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 Settler tautologies such as written Biblical and visual art historical references to oxen and plough clearing lands and Acadian coastal dyke irrigation systems each advance the figure of a pacified, willing Mi’kmaq/Mi’gmag subject.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.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
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 | 0.000 | 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 | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| 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