The Pass System in Practice: Restricting Indigenous Mobility in the Canadian Northwest, 1885–1915
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract This article is an examination of the impact of the pass system on First Nations people from the Treaty 4 District of Western Canada. The pass system, which was implemented by the Department of Indian Affairs (DIA) in 1885, was a system of administrative control that required many treaty people to obtain the permission of DIA staff before traveling off-reserve. The article is inspired by Alex Williams’s recent documentary The Pass System, which draws on the testimony of Indigenous elders while challenging accepted wisdom about both the impacts of the pass system and the length of its implementation. Through the examination of four case studies, the article shows how the pass system was applied indiscriminately, disrupting not only the free movement of First Nations people but also their governance structures. Finally, the article suggests that many Treaty Four people may have acquiesced to the pass system for the most part but resisted most vociferously in the context of the DIA’s attempt to curtail Nehiyaw ceremonies.
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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 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.028 | 0.015 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.004 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.005 | 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".