Foreclosing Accountability: The Limited Scope of the Seven Youth Inquest in Thunder Bay, Ontario
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Between 2000 and 2011 seven students from First Nation communities across northern Ontario lost their lives while attending high school in Thunder Bay. These losses of Indigenous life became the subject of a joint provincial inquest that concluded in the summer of 2016. In this article the author offers a critical examination of the scope of this inquest as well as a broader chronological review of its proceedings. The focus is on the ways in which the presiding coroner shaped the scope of the inquest to include things like the alcohol consumption of the students and to exclude things like the quality of police investigations. The issue of First Nation Jury Representation and its role in delaying the inquest for several years is also contextualized. Ultimately, it is argued that the Seven Youth Inquest conforms closely to what Sherene Razack (2011; 2015) has written about the colonial function of inquests into the deaths of Indigenous peoples: mainly that such proceedings stage decontextualized narratives of First Nation dysfunction that are hostile to structural analysis and unlikely to animate opportunities for institutional accountability. Finally, it is argued that non-Indigenous coroners – who are trained in forensic pathology but lack training in federal Indian policy, treaty rights, and Indigenous histories – are unqualified to preside over provincial inquests into the deaths of First Nation people. In fact, this training (or lack thereof) may facilitate setting woefully limited scopes and therefore reproducing victim-blaming of First Nation youth in Canadian courtrooms.RésuméEntre 2000 et 2011, sept étudiants Autochtones ont trouvé la mort alors qu’ils poursuivaient des études secondaires à Thunder Bay. Ces derniers venaient de plusieurs communautés des Premières Nations à travers l’Ontario. La mort de ces jeunes Autochtones a été le sujet d’une enquête du coroner de la province de l’Ontario qui a été conclue à l’été 2016. Les auteurs de cet article offrent une explication critique de la portée de cette enquête ainsi qu’une analyse chronologique plus vaste des procédures. Le thème principal est la façon dont le coroner qui présidait l’enquête a orienté sa portée afin d’inclure, entre autres, la consommation d’alcool des étudiants tout en excluant d’autres éléments tels la qualité des enquêtes policières. Le problème de la représentation des Premières Nations sur la liste des jurés et le rôle que cela a joué sur le retardement du procès pendant plusieurs années sont aussi mentionnés. De plus, l’enquête sur la mort de ces sept étudiants se rapproche beaucoup à ce que Sherene Razack a écrit au sujet du rôle colonialiste des enquêtes qui touchent la mort des personnes autochtones (2011 ; 2015). Son argument principal étant que ces procédures mettent en scène des récits décontextualisés du dysfonctionnement des Premières Nations qui vont à l’encontre de l’analyse structurale et qui rendent la possibilité de démontrer la responsabilité institutionnelle peu probable. Pour finir, ils disputent le fait que les coroners non autochtones ne sont pas qualifiés pour présider les enquêtes provinciales liées à la mort des personnes autochtones. Bien qu’ils aient la formation nécessaire en médecine légale, ces derniers manquent de formation quant aux Lois sur les Indiens, aux droits issus des traités et à l’histoire des Autochtones. En effet, cette formation (du moins, ces lacunes) faciliterait la fixation d’une portée manifestement limitée, permettant, par conséquent, la condamnation répétée de la victime chez les jeunes des Premières Nations dans les salles d’audience canadiennes.Mots clés: Enquête du coroner; colonialisme de peuplement; loi sur les Indiens; éducation des Premières Nations; études autochtones; histoire des traités; Thunder Bay
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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 | 0.011 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.034 | 0.012 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.007 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 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".