The ties that blind: making fee simple in the British Columbia treaty process
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Property is a crucial means by which space is made, and remade. This is powerfully evident in settler societies, such as British Columbia, Canada. To understand the work that property does requires us to attend to the manner in which it is entangled in and constitutive of a multitude of relations (ethical, practical, historical, semantic and so on). Yet for property to function, some of these relationships must be bracketed. That which is designated as inside a boundary must be partly disentangled from that identified as outside. Property practice and theory helps organise these exclusions. Yet this is not disinterested: Property's frames, therefore, can become political battle lines. Drawing from a modern‐day treaty process involving indigenous communities and the federal and provincial governments in British Columbia, Canada, I trace the ways in which the state has sought to disentangle property from its recently re‐emergent colonial entanglements. One of the ways in which it has tried to do this is to insist that First Nations hold their treaty settlement lands as a form of fee simple, this being bracketed as a clear and certain entitlement, replacing a messier ‘Aboriginal title’. First Nations negotiators, however, have pushed back, re‐entangling fee simple in culture, politics and place. I explore the performative use of categorisation on the part of the Crown in their attempt at re‐framing fee simple as ‘simple’. Apart from documenting this understudied postcolonial moment, I also encourage geographers to recognise the important work that property does in making space. To do so, I theorise property as an effect, performed through multiple technical and categorical enactments.
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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 | 0.006 | 0.014 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.047 | 0.031 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.018 | 0.005 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.009 |
| Research integrity | 0.006 | 0.007 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.010 | 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".