“The Earth is Our Mother”: Freedom of Religion and the Preservation of Indigenous Sacred Sites in Canada
Bibliographic record
Abstract
For centuries, the Canadian state engaged in systematic religious persecution of Indigenous peoples through legal prohibitions, coercive residential schooling, and the dispossession and destruction of sacred sites. Though the Canadian government has abandoned the criminalization of Indigenous religious practices and is beginning to come to grips with the devastating legacy of residential schools, it continues to permit the destruction and desecration of Indigenous sacred sites. Sacred sites play a crucial role in most Indigenous cosmologies and communities; they are as necessary to Indigenous religions as human-made places of worship are to other religious traditions. The ongoing case of Ktunaxa Nation v. British Columbia (Forests, Lands and Natural Resource Operations) represents the first opportunity for the Supreme Court of Canada to consider whether the destruction of an Indigenous sacred site constitutes a violation of freedom of religion under subsection 2(a) of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms. Building on the ground-breaking work of John Borrows and Sarah Morales, we will argue that Indigenous spiritual traditions have a home in this provision and merit a level of protection equal to that enjoyed by other faith groups in Canada. In general, subsection 2(a) will be infringed by non-trivial state (or state-sponsored) interference with an Indigenous sacred site. Moreover, the approval of commercial or industrial development on an Indigenous sacred site without consent and compensation will generally be unjustifiable under section 1 of the Charter. Recognition of these principles would signal respect for the equal religious citizenship of Indigenous Canadians.
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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 | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.044 | 0.018 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.011 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.004 | 0.007 |
| 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".