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.
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 distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.012 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.028 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 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 teacher head, 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".