The Bare Island Bird Sanctuary and the Myth of Indigenous Consent: Land Theft and Conservation in British Columbia, 1912–16
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In 1913, the Royal Commission on Indian Affairs (rcia) for the Province of British Columbia (also known as the McKenna-McBride or Indian Commission) ruled that an island reserve of the Tsawout and Tseycum First Nations of the W̱SÁNEĆ should be surrendered and sold to the province for the purposes of a bird sanctuary. In accordance with both the federal Indian Act and assurances repeatedly made at meetings with Indigenous leaders, the commission sought consent for the sale from what was then the Saanich Band of Indians. To their surprise and consternation, the W̱SÁNEĆ said no, becoming the only First Nation to successfully withhold approval and reject a decision of the royal commission. While the Bare Island Bird Sanctuary was never created, the provincial and federal governments subsequently colluded to change the law and break their promise, and, in 1920, the recommendations of the rcia’s General Report were enacted entirely without Indigenous consent. The campaign for the Bare Island Bird Sanctuary is a study of the micro-dynamics of land dispossession; an examination of the violence of a thousand cuts that brought about settler-colonial jurisdiction over Indigenous land. The failure of the Bare Island Bird Sanctuary is the exception that proves the rule, illustrating how conservation and consent were both subordinated to the settler governments’ efforts to distribute Indigenous territory profitably amongst themselves.
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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 | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.040 | 0.020 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.008 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.007 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.009 | 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".