Legal Personhood and Literary Resistance: Rita Mestokosho’s River Writing in Quebec
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In 1990, sixty Cree and Inuit protesters embarked on a journey down the Hudson River from Quebec to Manhattan in a powerful act of defiance against the plans of Hydro-Québec, Quebec’s national hydroelectric company, to build a new complex of dams within their ancestral territories. These dams, which threatened to disrupt the natural flow of the Great Whale River and flood surrounding areas, were the second phase of the massive James Bay hydroelectric project that was central to symbolic and infrastructural nation-building during the Quiet Revolution in Quebec in the 1960s and 1970s, effectively becoming symbols of “l'identité québécoise moderne” (Lamoureux 181). The proposed dams would endanger wildlife habitats and the traditional way of life for the Cree and Inuit peoples for the sake of exporting energy from Quebec to New York and other points in the Northeastern USA. Determined to protect their environment and preserve their cultural heritage, the protesters navigated the waters in canoes in an expedition they called the Odeyak, a hybrid term designating the kind of vessel that was constructed for the journey: “ode,” a Cree word for “canoe,” and “kayak,” an Inuktitut word. Their peaceful protest attracted international attention and highlighted the ongoing struggle of First Nations communities against the encroachment of industrial development and desecration of First Nations territories in Quebec. Furthermore, the protest prompted the cancellation of New York’s contract to purchase energy from Hydro-Québec. These changes were made thanks, in great part, to the intuition of the Cree and Inuit protesters that crossing borders, like the energy Hydro-Québec planned to sell, would be key to their success. Caroline Desbiens argues that this protest and its resulting alterations to Indigenous relations and to the hydroelectric development in the area benefitted from the politics of scale: “In their efforts to rally international support for their cause, the Crees had bypassed the Quebec nation-state—or jumped scale—a strategy that clearly conflicted with the Quebec government’s efforts to maintain James Bay as the site of a ‘domestic’ struggle” (Power 50).
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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 | 0.006 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.050 | 0.013 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.013 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.004 | 0.006 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.010 | 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".