Colonizing the demos? Settler rights, Indigenous sovereignty, and the contested ‘structure of governance’ in Canada’s North
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Settler-colonialism can consist of a struggle over the pre-political ‘structure of governance’ – over who composes the demos and how decisions should be made. This article examines two lawsuits where settlers contested the Indigenous structure of governance in Canada’s Northwest Territories. I show that in both cases settlers brandished a novel ‘tool of elimination,’ individual rights to voting, mobility and expression. I trace how settlers used this tool in a strategic two-pronged way, challenging as ‘illiberal’ restrictive laws flowing from Indigenous sovereignty and then championing race-neutral laws the promulgation of which would open the demos to settler domination. I show that courts adjudicating these challenges were compelled to grapple with the appropriate ‘framing of justice’ – with whether the relevant rights-bearer was the universal individual or the ‘constitutionally prior’ Indigenous demos. I conclude that, where the court decided on individual-rights grounds, settlers were able to extend control over the structure of governance.
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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 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.023 | 0.027 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.006 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 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".