Living Nature of a Modern Treaty
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In 2011 the Maa-nulth Treaty came into effect, replacing the Indian Act for the five Nuu-chah-nulth signatories to the Maa-nulth Final Agreement. Tucked in the first section of the treaty is the periodic review where the “Living Tree” doctrine – a foundational legal principle that directs and sets precedent for common law in Canada – is enacted. In 2026, the Maa-nulth Treaty will undergo its first periodic review, with the option to open up and revise the treaty. While Nuu-chah-nulth Nations have long revisited sacred agreements included in legal principles, revisiting such agreements with Crown parties is relatively new in British Columbia. Based on the thematic analysis of twenty-five interviews with Maa-nulth Treaty implementation team members from the Maa-nulth Treaty Society, the federal and provincial governments, and the Alliance of British Columbia Modern Treaty Nations, in this article we explore how treaty signatories perceive and are preparing for the periodic review. We do so while nesting our findings in the supposed evolution of treaty conceptualizations from cede and surrender through to the current Recognition and Reconciliation of Rights Policy in British Columbia. Findings suggest that representatives from across the treaty table are generally willing to uphold the living nature of treaty per priorities identified by Maa-nulth Nations. Yet challenges with implementation remain, particularly associated with poor funding of the treaty, the shuffling of representatives in federal and provincial governments, the magnitude of implementing self-governance for First Nations, and a lack of understanding across federal and provincial governments about the complexity of implementation.
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 distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.047 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| 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 teacher head, 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".