Changing the Narrative: Settler Colonialism, Food and the Columbia River Treaty
Bibliographic record
Abstract
While the written terms of the Columbia River Treaty appear to justify the often-heard claim that it is all about hydropower and flood control, a full account of its history reveals its critical importance to US agriculture and close relationship to early phases of colonization and development in the Upper Columbia River Basin. In this paper I argue that the Treaty is best understood as the third phase in the last large-scale government-sponsored settler colonialism project in North America, a project that began with the construction of the Grand Coulee Dam in the 1930s. I further argue that the dominant narrative that informs current efforts by Canada and the US to revise the treaty does not fully recognize the settler colonial structure of the original treaty or its critical impact on both Indigenous and settler food systems throughout the basin. I begin with a description of the history of the treaty, in order to demonstrate its continuity with earlier phases of settler colonialism, then focus on its impact on food systems. I conclude with an assessment of the ongoing Canada/US treaty review and renegotiation process that began in 2011 with suggestions for how the process could be brought into better alignment with the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples and the Calls to Action of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada.
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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 | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.035 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| 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 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".