The undercurrents of water stewardship in the Syilx Okanagan territory: Setting the stage for ethical space engagement
Bibliographic record
Abstract
‘Ethical space,’ as defined at the intersection of Indigenous and Western worldviews, draws attention to the unseen forces that shape cross-cultural relations. Applying ethical space as a conceptual lens, this study examines Indigenous and non-Indigenous perspectives on water stewardship in the Syilx Okanagan territory in British Columbia, Canada, with the aim of uncovering these invisible dynamics. Through qualitative inquiry with Syilx and non-Indigenous participants, we identify areas of convergence and divergence in understandings of water stewardship. We find that both groups recognized the exclusionary nature of colonial water governance. Indigenous participants emphasized inherent water rights tied to unceded territory, while non-Indigenous participants often overlooked these legal and historical dimensions. Water was framed as a sacred ‘relative’ by Syilx participants and as a ‘resource’ by non-Indigenous participants, reflecting contrasting ontologies and values. Despite these broad differences, there was consensus on the importance of building cultural competencies and addressing systemic governance inequities. Findings underscore the complexities of cross-cultural collaboration in water stewardship amidst broader political, economic, and social challenges. Future research should focus on ethical space as praxis in multi-institutional settings including the role of policy in supporting these efforts, and its potential for building new partnership models to address pressing social-ecological challenges.
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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 | 0.004 | 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 | 0.017 | 0.032 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.008 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.009 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| 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".