Smoke in the Court of the Thief: Smudging as a Religious Act in Canadian Law
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Should smudging, a spiritual Indigenous practice, be allowed in schools? Canadian jurisprudence regarding religion and religious freedom in the last 150 years has tended to favor a western, classical liberal approach that separates the secular from the spiritual. This approach excludes the possibility of meaningful decolonial dialogue and reconciliation in the spirit of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission’s (TRC) 94 Calls to Action. This paper uses the case of Candice Servatius to interrogate notions of “religion” and “public space” within Canadian law. I argue that while smudging does fall into the definition of a “religious” practice established by the Supreme Court of Canada, the challenge of reconciliation given to Canadians by the TRC compels us to recognize the place of the sacred within public life, including in the public school system.
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 | 0.005 | 0.011 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.064 | 0.039 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.013 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.003 | 0.006 |
| Research integrity | 0.009 | 0.011 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.006 | 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".