Racialised and Colonial Constructions of Climate Disaster: News Media Framing of Indigenous Wildfire Evacuations in Western Canada
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Environmental disasters disproportionately impact Indigenous peoples worldwide. In Canada, wildfires and flooding increasingly threaten First Nations communities, prompting frequent evacuations to urban areas. Housed for months and sometimes even years in marginal inner-city hotels and temporary housing, evacuees face a range of negative health and social outcomes and are subject to heightened securitization and stereotyping by authorities and local media. This article presents the findings of a qualitative and comparative analysis of media framing of wildfire evacuations in Jasper, Alberta and in Manitoba First Nations communities. Compared to the non-Indigenous community, Indigenous evacuees were framed negatively as a threat to the safety and prosperity of the city. News framing amplified colonial and racialized stereotypes while ignoring the root causes of frequent evacuations. Media framing works in tandem with government policies to perpetuate the slow violence of colonialism and environmental disaster while positioning Indigenous peoples outside the imagined Canadian community.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 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 teacher head, 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".