“A dangerous tool in the wrong hands”: Sovereign technologies in Alanis Obomsawin’s <i>Is the Crown at War with Us?</i> and Barry Barclay’s <i>The Kaipara Affair</i>
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abenaki film-maker Alanis Obomsawin’s 2002 film Is the Crown at War with Us? and Ngāti Apa film-maker Barry Barclay’s 2005 documentary The Kaipara Affair depict tensions between Indigenous sovereignty and global capitalism through the lens of two distinct fishing rights struggles drawn from Canada and Aotearoa/New Zealand. This article examines themes of documentation, surveillance, and environmental resource extraction that echo across both films to argue that these technologies – as narrativized in Obomsawin’s and Barclay’s works – offer the potential for negotiation in a continuing anti-colonial resistance, both in the localized struggles of Esgenoopetitj/Burnt Church in Canada and Tinopai in Aotearoa/New Zealand, and further suggest potential strategies for emulation across the (post)colonial globe. Andrew Woolford’s metaphor of the settler-colonial “net” is used to analyse the depiction of fishing practices as a contested arena for global capitalism and Indigenous stewardship that is narratively and aesthetically challenged by both film-makers.
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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 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.014 | 0.025 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.006 | 0.006 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.005 |
| 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".