Judicial Treatment of Aboriginal Peoples’ Oral History Evidence: More Room for Reconciliation
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Oral history is the only past record in many Aboriginal groups in Canada. In 1997, in Delgamuukw, the Supreme Court of Canada recognized that the strict approach to evidence law with respect to oral history had to be relaxed for Aboriginal peoples to be able to pursue claims to Aboriginal rights or Aboriginal title. This was a necessary element of the attempt to achieve reconciliation between Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal peoples. Yet, while evidence law has become increasingly flexible when it comes to accommodating Aboriginal peoples, courts have struggled with how to value oral traditions. A review of the case law since Delgamuukw reveals that courts typically find oral testimony evidence admissible but give it little weight. They tend to favour written records when they conflict with oral testimony evidence. The Eurocentric preference towards written records is undermining the potential for reconciliation.\nL’histoire orale est la seule consignation du passé pour de nombreux groupes autochtones au Canada. En 1997, dans l’arrêt Delgamuukw, la Cour suprême du Canada a reconnu que l’approche stricte du droit de la preuve en matière d’histoire orale devait être assouplie pour que les peuples autochtones puissent revendiquer les droits ancestraux ou le titre autochtone. Il s’agissait là d’un élément nécessaire pour l’effort de réconciliation entre les Autochtones et les nonAutochtones. Pourtant, bien que le droit de la preuve soit devenu de plus en plus souple lorsqu’il s’agit d’accommoder les peuples autochtones, les tribunaux ont eu de la difficulté à apprécier les traditions orales. Un examen de la jurisprudence depuis l’arrêt Delgamuukw révèle que les tribunaux jugent généralement que les témoignages oraux sont admissibles, mais qu’ils leur accordent peu de poids. Ils ont tendance à favoriser les documents écrits lorsqu’ils entrent en conn it avec les témoignages oraux. La préférence eurocentrique pour les documents écrits mine le potentiel de réconciliation.
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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 | 0.075 | 0.114 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.005 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.015 | 0.028 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.025 | 0.012 |
| Open science | 0.007 | 0.010 |
| Research integrity | 0.016 | 0.020 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 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".