The Factual Basis for Indigenous Land Rights (Advance)
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Groundbreaking judgments in Australia and Canada in the 1990s reveal that Indigenous land rights depend on evidence of Indigenous occupation and law when the British Crown asserted sovereignty. Looking back at earlier Indigenous rights decisions, it is apparent that they were not based on facts, but on prejudicial and erroneous assumptions about Indigenous peoples. In St Catherine’s Milling and Lumber Co v The Queen (‘St Catherine’s’), Lord Watson said the rights of the Ojibwe Indians were based solely on the goodwill of the Crown, a conclusion that evidently stemmed from the trial judge’s racist assessment of Ojibwe society. In Cooper v Stuart, Lord Watson wrongly described New South Wales as a ‘territory practically unoccupied, without settled inhabitants or settled law’ at the time it became a British colony. This article demonstrates that what was missing in the 1880s was not law supporting Indigenous land rights, but rather evidence that should have led to the application of existing law. Erroneous factual assumptions resulted in legal precedents that led to the denial of Indigenous rights for around a century. Nor is the impact of these precedents entirely spent — even today, false arguments are made that there was no basis in 19th century common law for Indigenous land rights.
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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 | 0.012 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.005 | 0.037 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.006 | 0.006 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.006 | 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".