The Historic and Contemporary Permanence of the Doctrine of Discovery in Canada
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In the Truth and Reconciliation’s Final Report, four of the 94 calls to action referred to the repudiation of concepts which have justified claims of European sovereignty while implicitly refuting claims that dismiss the legitimacy of Indigenous land ownership prior to European contact. This paper demonstrates how the concepts of terra nullius and the Doctrine of Discovery have prevented the recognition and affirmation of Indigenous peoples’ sovereignty in Canada historically and presently. This article will first introduce the concepts of the Doctrine of Discovery and terra nullius as religious constructs and demonstrate how these concepts became integrated into the colonial mentality of European countries by drawing from Andrew Crosby and Jeffery Monaghan’s concept of “settler governmentality.” These two concepts, in particular, justified the false pretensions of European countries to assume they could occupy, ‘discover’ and take the land from Indigenous peoples. By acknowledging Indigenous sovereignty is inherently connected to their relationship with the land, this article will conclude by analyzing the work of contemporary academics and reports that argue Indigenous laws cannot be adequately acknowledged under the current Canadian legislation.
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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 | 0.005 | 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 | 0.038 | 0.044 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.012 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.004 | 0.007 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 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".