The dispossession(s) of law : Indigenous peoples, Canada, and articulated jurisdictions
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In this dissertation, I seek to answer: what are the limits to attempts by Indigenous peoples to articulate our own forms of law through the languages and institutions of settler law? I answer this question through a set of distinct but related case studies: the making of Treaty 7, Piikani challenges to the Oldman River Dam, and the theorization of Urban Indigeneity in Canadian cities. Building on existing works within Indigenous geographies, legal geography, and Indigenous legal studies, this dissertation explores how Indigenous law is operationalized in the face of past and present attempts at erasure on the part of the Canadian state. I thus seek to answer: what are the limits of decolonial manifestations of Indigenous law when expressed through Canadian and other settler forms of law? To do this, I draw from both contemporary discussions concerning Marx’s theory of primitive accumulation and the related ‘articulation’ debates of the 1970s. Instead of articulation between modes of production, however, I explore the relevance of these analytical tools to examine relationships between Indigenous and settler legal orders. I argue: In struggles against the capitalist reterritorialization of Indigenous places, it is through the assertions of competing legal jurisdictions that these struggles tend to find their most profound expression. Indigenous legal orders thus tend to exist in a complex unity with settler forms of law, whereby we often attempt to express our own laws through the language, institutions, and other forms of settler colonial law. [An errata to this dissertation was made available on 2026-01-28.]
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 | 0.010 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.006 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.045 | 0.060 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.016 | 0.006 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.009 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.005 |
| 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".