“Shelters are no different from a jail”: Historical Trauma, Biopower, and Culturally-grounded Harm Reduction Initiatives in Aboriginal Communities
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Harm reduction exists antithetically to abstinence-only treatment, wherein the focus is to both reduce the negative effects of substance use without necessarily extinguishing the problematic health behaviors completely, and to alter the material and social conditions predicating harmful substance use. It is more importantly a means by which disaffected groups can unite and seek mutual liberation through the lens of public health and social justice. While harm reduction’s origins lie in radical politics, its current iterations in Canada are becoming increasingly neoliberal in practice and ultimately present a barrier to healing and recovery to those most affected by systems that create conditions for drug-related harm. The state’s institutionalized responses to substance use, including child removal, drug courts, and abstinence-only homeless shelters, represent oppressive biopolitical interference with Indigenous existence and mirror practices of carceral genocide enacted by the Indian Residential School (IRS) system. Harm reduction initiatives are intended to exist in opposition to these practices, yet ultimately fall short and indeed enforce harmful settler hierarchies. Settler-colonialism and the open wound of historical trauma left upon Aboriginal communities by this system—manifesting as higher rates of violence and substance use, among other disparities—remain unaddressed by most harm reduction initiatives that are not culturally safe or specific. The pathologization of substance use disorders (SUD) as an individual issue among Aboriginal peoples minimizes the culpability of the state in enacting community-wide, historical traumas that are specific to Aboriginal peoples. This review attempts to advocate for culturally-grounded harm reduction initiatives for Aboriginal peoples in Canada, utilizing a sociohistorical analysis that draws a narrative link between projects of governance and notable manifestations such as residential schooling, historical trauma, contemporary substance use, and the failure of sanitized neoliberal harm reduction initiatives that do not provide genuine recovery for Aboriginal peoples residing in the fourth world. This paper closes with an analysis of salient themes from Aboriginal-led, culturally grounded harm reduction initiatives, and a recommendation for further emphasis on community-based care.
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 | 0.005 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.050 | 0.061 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.009 | 0.006 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.012 |
| Research integrity | 0.004 | 0.009 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 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".