Decolonization, Not Patriation: The Constitution Express at the Russell Tribunal
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This article examines the international dimension of the Constitution Express, a 1980s Indigenous movement led by the Union of BC Indian Chiefs to oppose patriation of the Canadian Constitution from the UK. As an international movement for Indigenous jurisdiction, its efforts to challenge state sovereignty in international fora, and to expand the discussion of Indigenous Peoples' place in patriation from rights to nationhood, complicates the legacy of recognition that has often been applied to it since. This article demonstrates how the movement’s assertions of Indigenous nationhood at the international level belie the narrative of Canadian sovereignty at the heart of the patriation project. Through a layered dialogue between the authors, it focus particularly on what transpired at the first international venue before which the Constitution Express made such assertions: The Fourth Russell Tribunal on the Rights of the Indians of the Americas. Informed by anti-colonial movments of the Third World, the interventions of the Constitution Express at the Russell Tribunal pushed the conversation beyond protections for minority rights, into the realm of jurisdiction, self-determination, and decolonization – topics which other international fora, particularly the United Nations, had reserved for postcolonial states alone, and not Indigenous Peoples. In this, it sought to bring about the “Fourth World,” a world beyond the Three Worlds of the UN, where constitutions and confederations could be built free of imperial domination.
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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 | 0.007 | 0.011 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.015 | 0.034 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.012 | 0.005 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.006 |
| Research integrity | 0.005 | 0.010 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.001 |
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".