Clarifying dissenting voices: Exploring the ambivalence around the Canadian national inquiry into missing and murdered Indigenous women and girls
Bibliographic record
Abstract
From the outset, the Canadian National Inquiry into Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls (NIMMIWG, 2016-2019), whose mandate was to investigate and report on the systemic causes of all forms of violence against Indigenous women and girls, has faced complaints from survivors, families of the missing and murdered, and Indigenous associations across the country. By exploring the crisis of legitimacy experienced during the NIMMIWG's process, this article traces the interplay between the inquiry's legal scope, public grievances and possible testimonial outcomes. The objective is to consider how conflicting views and ambivalence in understanding the inquiry's vision and role have impacted this truth-gathering process focused on survivors and families' testimonies of colonial and gendered violence. The first section recalls general doubts and suspicions expressed in Canadian media (2015-2018) towards the inquiry's goals and actions, notably with respect to questions of liability. The second section analyses a few public testimonies about 'stolen sisters' given during the Montreal public hearing, which reveal an irreducible tension between finding new forms of accountability, notably by police forces and the judicial system, and the cultural and healing remembrance platform of the NIMMIWG. The last section reflects on how this state-sponsored apparatus, based on a language of truth-telling and remembrance, avoided an opportunity to address systemic structures of violence towards Indigenous women, girls, queer, trans, and two-spirit people with regard to inequalities and redistribution faced by families and survivors of loved ones, not only in their everyday lives and their experience of destruction and death, but also, I argue, in sustaining their participation in this state-sponsored process and its aftermath.
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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 | 0.034 | 0.048 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.005 | 0.005 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.090 | 0.072 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.024 | 0.007 |
| Open science | 0.008 | 0.017 |
| Research integrity | 0.008 | 0.014 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 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".