Negotiating Sovereignty through Taxation: Direct Taxes, Indigenous Peoples, and Settler Sovereignty in Upper Canada to 1850
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Did local taxes levied by the Upper Canadian parliament from 1793 apply to Indigenous communities in the colony? Only in 1850 did colonial legislation give an answer by exempting Indigenous peoples from taxes on real and personal property and from statute labour, provided they resided on “Indian” lands. Yet Indigenous leaders had always denied that the colony’s jurisdiction extended to their communities, which they conceived of as political societies governed by their own customary law. A de facto tax exemption had emerged as a result of their refusal of perfect settler sovereignty, but settler resentment grew in the 1820s and 1830s, often focused on local roads. Prior to 1850, colonial law on the question of tax liability was unsettled. Successive attorneys general offered different answers, and the de facto tax exemption was most often associated with the nature of Indigenous land tenure rather than any recognition of their constitutional status. The 1850 act emerged from two contradictory forces: a renewed empire-wide emphasis on humanitarian “protection” of Indigenous peoples as a strategy of colonial governance and Haudenosaunee demands for protection as a strategy to preserve their collective self-government in the face of increasingly aggressive attempts to tax them. Direct taxes were a technology of colonial rule, marking identities and measuring settler sovereignty and the status of Indigenous peoples and land.
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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 | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.004 | 0.010 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.003 | 0.005 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.004 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| 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".