Determining the “Core of Indianness:” A Feminist Political Economy of NIL/TU,O v. BCGEU
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In light of Bill C-92, which establishes a framework for delegating child and family service provision to Indigenous communities, this article addresses the contested regulation of employment and labour relations in Indigenous social service workplaces. It approaches this subject by looking back at NIL/TU,O Child and Family Services Society v. B.C. Government and Service Employees’ Union, a case in which employees at a First Nations child and family services provider attempted to unionize. NIL/TU,O set in motion a legal battle over the jurisdiction of Indigenous labour relations that ultimately reached the Supreme Court of Canada in 2010. The SCC’s determined that the labours of the Indigenous workers at NIȽ TU,O Child and Family Services are a matter of provincial jurisdiction because they fall outside of the “core of Indianness,“ a contested legal concept used to designate federal legislative power over First Nations peoples. Using Indigenous feminisms and a feminist political economy approach, we argue that this decision rests on gendered appraisals – and, indeed, obfuscations – of social reproduction labour. Bill C-92 necessitates revisiting the case history in NIL/TU,O because of the ways in which it seems to conflict with the new Act. We suggest that the uncertainty surrounding jurisdiction over Indigenous labour has the dual potential of, on the one hand, being used strategically for exploitative or dis-possessive purposes, or, on the other hand, taken up as a opening for increased self-determination by Indigenous peoples.
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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 | 0.007 | 0.008 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.021 | 0.053 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.013 | 0.005 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.007 |
| Research integrity | 0.005 | 0.012 |
| 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".