Indigenous food sovereignty through resurgent self-governance: centering Nuu-chah-nulth principles in sea otter management in Canada
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Although North American settler governments face scrutiny over the ecological, social, and ethical shortcomings of environmental policy, many Indigenous Nations are pursuing a resurgence of environmental self-governance according to ancestral principles and practices. On the west coast of Vancouver Island, the reintroduction and prioritized conservation of sea otters by Canada's Department of Fisheries and Oceans (DFO) actively impedes the harvest of culturally and nutritionally significant shellfish species by Nuu-chah-nulth Nations. Integrating a range of qualitative methods, we argue that structural inequities, divergent normative and material priorities, and ontological differences animate a divide between Nuu-chah-nulth and Canadian state governing bodies in sea otter management. The DFO’s unwillingness to accommodate Indigenous knowledge, principles, and priorities in its sea otter management scheme reproduces the unequal power relations of settler colonialism to the detriment of Indigenous food sovereignty and security. We propose to reframe sea otter governance around the Nuu-chah-nulth principles of hišukʔiš c̓awaak (everything is one), ʔiisaak (respect with caring), and ʔuʔaałuk (taking care of). This reorientation is in alignment with the efforts of Indigenous peoples throughout Canada and globally to enact multi-species caretaking through the resurgence of self-governance rooted in ancestral knowledge and wisdom. Ultimately, we argue that a sea otter governance structure centering Nuu-chah-nulth principles, ecological knowledge, and leadership would be well-positioned to lead collaborations and respectful engagement between Indigenous and non-Indigenous Nations.
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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 | 0.005 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.026 | 0.038 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.010 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.007 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 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".