Exemplary Punishment: T.R.L. MacInnes, the Department of Indian Affairs, and Indigenous Executions, 1936–52
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This article focuses on a series of death penalty recommendations written by Department of Indian Affairs (dia) Secretary Thomas Robert Loftus (T.R.L.) MacInnes between 1936 and 1952, arguing that these recommendations contributed to the increase in Indigenous executions in the 1940s. Identifying MacInnes as a “born bureaucrat” and member of the governing elite in a brief biographical sketch, professional and personal connections are drawn between MacInnes and Duncan Campbell Scott, arguing that MacInnes inherited Scott’s legacy and extended his influence for another generation in the department. A discussion of the social and political context of the dia in the 1940s describes changes in the department at the culmination of a long period of policy stability stretching from the early nineteenth century. Attention is paid to networks of knowledge production and centralization of control at dia headquarters in Ottawa, and how the information collected from the field enabled MacInnes to claim expertise as an amateur criminologist. An analysis of themes in the recommendations reveals a reliance on tropes from the quasi science of criminal anthropology in classifying Indigenous peoples on a scale of criminal responsibility that mapped onto racial hierarchies and the dia’s “civilization policy.” The article discusses how MacInnes constructed and deployed racializing narratives in response to the “problem” of Indigenous peoples rejecting whiteness and explains how he positioned Indigenous executions as a being in the “interest of Indian administration.”
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.
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 | 0.005 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.030 | 0.014 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.007 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.009 |
| 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".