Threats from within and threats from without: Wet’suwet’en protesters, irregular asylum seekers and on-going settler colonialism in Canada
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This paper addresses the ‘immigrant-Aboriginal parallax gap' whereby material connections between immigration and Indigenous dispossession are rarely examined in tandem by considering ways in which the Canadian media frames Indigenous protesters and irregular asylum seekers. Building on the work of previous studies of Oka/Kanasatake, Ipperwash and Caledonia and irregular boat arrivals of Fujian and Tamil asylum seekers, it identifies similarities in the ways that each group has been racialized, criminalized, delegitimized and constructed as the ‘Other'. Employing the theoretical frameworks of settler colonialism and securitization theory, it examines whether the same frames persist in contemporary representations using the case studies of Wet'suwet'en protesters and irregular asylum seekers crossing the Canada–US border at Roxham Road, Québec. A comparative discourse analysis finds that the media continues to frame Indigenous protesters and irregular asylum seekers as threats to the ‘rule of law' and the ‘common good'. These framings discredit and delegitimize human rights claims that challenge the legitimacy of settler colonial borders – including the right to peaceful protest and to claim asylum – turning them into threats to Canada’s sovereignty, thus necessitating state action. We conclude that this discourse has the effect of reproducing the racialized injustices and inequalities of ongoing settler colonialism.
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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 | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.025 | 0.016 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.010 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| 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".