“We the North” As the Dispossession of Indigenous Identity and a Slogan of Canada’s Enduring Colonial Legacy
Bibliographic record
Abstract
As the only Canadian team in the professional United States’ National Basketball Association, the Toronto Raptors adopted the slogan “We the North.” The new slogan is designed to invoke historical myths and narratives of what or who Canada is. The slogan emblematically assumes, as a metanarrative, the mythologized national identity of Canada as distinctly “northern,” revealing itself to be a reproduction of banal nationalism in Canada in the process. It is, however, more than that: it is the appropriation of an imagined northern Canadian, and specifically Inuit or authentic northern (indigenous) identity. Something as seemingly innocuous and banal as a Canadian sports team’s slogan can manifest the enduring colonial legacy of Canada. Banal nationalism in Canada is anything but benign, and in the case of the Raptor’s highly appropriative slogan, dispossessive of Inuit identity and an enduring symbol of Canada’s colonial legacy. In the process of attempting to encapsulate the imagined Canadian national identity and fashion it into a metanarrative, the slogan appropriates the uniqueness that makes northerners and northern indigenous peoples what they are, northerners, and dispossesses them of facets of their identity.
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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 | 0.005 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.026 | 0.044 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.012 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.004 | 0.005 |
| 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".