Voices of Indigenous Youth: Exploring Land Attachments in the Transition Beyond Mining Economies
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Indigenous youth in mining regions of the Northwest Territories have often been left out of discussions about their futures, despite facing the brunt of impacts from an extractive political economy. The Territory’s mine-based economy has led to years of environmental destruction, as well as the systemic devaluation of Indigenous livelihoods, perpetuating settler colonial legacies of wealth and governance. As diamond mines begin to close over the next decade, we worked alongside the Tłı̨chǫ Government to document what the future holds for northern communities and explore the long-term implications of colonial mining regimes. My work was part of the SSHRC-funded project, Futures of Care (PI: Rebecca Hall). Taking a youth-oriented perspective, I analyzed and interpreted approximately 70 interviews and workshops. These were subsequently coded to thematically examine firsthand experiences from Indigenous youth community members. I documented and compiled the prominent data patterns into a community report for local partners, aiming to inform the integration of Northern Indigenous youth into policy and programming which supports their aspirations. Various areas of concern and interest emerged, central to understanding how youth’s experiences and visualizations of the future can be actualized. These include concerns and hopes for cultural vitality, environmental protection, funding and economic stability, educational access and development, territorial (NWT) security, youth wellbeing, youth career opportunities, and the looming omnipresence of extractive industries. Amongst others, connections to land have consistently and overwhelmingly emerged as a critical guiding factor for youth aspirations. Consequently, this project can offer insight for communities advocating for just and resilient transitions in the face of mine closure, meeting the culturally specific needs of Indigenous youth while ensuring protection of land resources, and access to relevant work opportunities.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
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 | 0.005 | 0.005 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.016 | 0.009 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.007 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.009 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 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".