The Afterlives of <i>Terra Nullius</i>: Unmarked Graves, Indigenous ‘Discoveries’, and Colonial After-Thoughts
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The 2021 discovery of the unmarked graves of Indigenous children by the Tk’emlúps te Secwépemc First Nation on the grounds of the former Kamloops Indian Residential School in British Columbia revealed the brutal genocide at the heart of Canadian colonial rule. Canadian governments and the Catholic Church had sought to leave this issue buried, literally and figuratively, by asserting a modern form of terra nullius in positing that these and other residential schools were ‘empty lands’ in the sense that they did not contain the remains of Indigenous children, even as Indigenous nations knew the truth. This essay argues that these gruesome discoveries are evidence of the after-lives of terra nullius of modern settler colonialism, where Indigenous peoples’ deaths are a colonial after-thought in settler society, which leads to settler denials and avoidance of responsibility for the damage done. This colonial after-thought can be traced right on up to Pope Francis’ apology for the Church’s role in the schools. In resistance to the settler effort to produce Indigenous peoples as ontological absences, as colonial after-thoughts, nations such as the Tk’emlúps te Secwépemc demonstrate the power of Indigenous resurgence through their persistence in nation and movement building.
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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 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.017 | 0.061 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.006 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| 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".