Prophecy redux: a critique of Leanne Simpson’s concept of autogenocide
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This article examines the thought of Leanne Betasamosake Simpson as a case study in Indigenous decolonial theory. Primarily by engaging with Simpson’s approach in As We Have Always Done, it develops a critique of the concept of ‘autogenocide’. It argues that the liberatory potential of grounded normativity is undercut by Simpson’s juxtaposition of resistance with the immediate threat of self-destruction. This is signalled by the failure to exist in an adequately Indigenous ontological domain. The result arguably summons myths about Indigenous disappearance – that Indigenous peoples are a ‘dying race’ responsible for their own demise, and thus may read as injurious to Indigenous peoples who defy the markers of indigeneity outlined by Simpson in her Radical Resurgence Project. This critique is framed with reference to biopolitics, resilience, and Indigenous suicide. Transposing autogenocide to the Indigenous suicide crisis in Canada demands that the utility of the concept be evaluated in terms of another anti-colonial imaginary, where death by suicide exposes the structural violence of settler colonialism. It further contends that Critical Indigenous Studies is uniquely charged with confronting the intellectual, political, and philosophical consequences produced by the autogenocide concept. Most importantly, the alternative forms of essentialism and erasure that it heralds.
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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 | 0.008 | 0.009 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.011 | 0.073 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.007 | 0.006 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.005 | 0.013 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 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".