Looping effects, settler colonialism, and the indigenous child removal system
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Between 1950 and 1985, a period now referred to as the “Sixties Scoop”, over 24,000 Indigenous and Inuit children were removed from their families and placed into primarily non-Indigenous foster and adoptive homes across Canada. Whereas the Residential school system was explicitly racist and genocidal in its orientation, the Sixties Scoop racism was cloaked in accusations of neglect and child-saving rhetoric. Drawing on Hacking’s concept of looping effects, we examine how social workers classify their work and the Indigenous children they removed from their homes. We analyse sixteen interviews with social workers working in child welfare during the Sixties Scoop who were involved with the removal of Indigenous children. This article links broader systems that are fraught with racism, to the rank-and-file individuals tasked with carrying out child protection policies, and it probes the interpretations and classifications used both then and now to understand Indigenous child removal.
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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 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.011 | 0.028 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.003 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| 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".