Bibliographic record
Abstract
We have good reason to worry that a jurisprudential world guided by a state duty of religious neutrality is one in which Indigenous claims for religious freedom will fare particularly badly. This is so because state neutrality is an ideal precisely aimed at the depoliticization of religion, and yet it is precisely the depoliticization of Indigenous religions that robs them of their specificity and force. Following a methodological note on the use of the term “religion” to describe the complex and diverse rituals, practices, worldviews, and metaphysical commitments of Indigenous communities that are of concern in this piece, this chapter examines the demands that the Supreme Court of Canada’s emergent “duty of religious neutrality” imposes on the state. The two core demands — a requirement for even-handedness and an obligation for restraint in religious matters — involve and imply a certain ethic of metaphysical abstemiousness aimed at disentangling or insulating law and politics from the contested field of religious difference. But this piece explains that these two demands collide with the history, realities, and needs of Indigenous religious traditions, and with odious effects for their religious freedom. After theorizing how these demands work to limit Indigenous people’s claims for religious freedom, this chapter shows these effects in action in the Supreme Court of Canada’s first case considering an Indigenous religious freedom claim under section 2(a), Ktunaxa Nation v British Columbia. The chapter ultimately claims that a clear-eyed view of the nature and effects of the state duty of religious neutrality discloses a hole in the heart of what freedom of religion can offer as a vehicle for Indigenous justice.
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 | 0.003 | 0.006 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.011 | 0.018 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.008 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.005 | 0.007 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.009 | 0.001 |
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".