The Commodification of Indigeneity as a Tool for Ongoing Settler Colonization in Canada
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The initial settler colonization of Canada involved the implementation of the settler colonial Doctrine of Discovery on Indigenous lands to make them ‘open’ for white settlement and ownership, along with capitalism and heteropatriarchy to assert white settler dominance over Indigenous lands, cultures, and bodies. Although it has been over 500 years since first contact between white Europeans and Indigenous peoples in Canada, the ideologies that paved the way for white settlement in Canada are continually reproduced through social institutions, such as the legal system, to maintain settler domination. This thesis explicates the connections between settler colonialism, capitalism, and heteropatriarchy within Saskatchewan and Canadian law to analyze the commodification of Indigeneity as a tool for ongoing settler colonization. Grounded in a Métis feminist theoretical framework, I investigate how and why The Heritage Property Act (1979-80) steals and commodifies Indigenous cultural artifacts for settler government profit. Through a critical literature review, case study of the above-mentioned act, and dream-work, I identify two themes: the Settler Timeline and the Commodification of Indigeneity. Importantly, this thesis recognizes that many Indigenous individual and community identities evolve through links between the past and present, which Indigenous peoples reflect on to move into a good future. As such, cultural artifacts are paramount to cultural identity and continuity within Indigenous nations and communities. The findings of this thesis reveal that the ongoing settler conceptualization of Indigenous peoples as uncivil epistemically justifies the commodification of Indigenous cultural artifacts. This thesis also suggests that, just as decolonization within the settler colonial context necessarily requires the repatriation of all lands, it also requires the repatriation of all stolen and commodified Indigenous cultural artifacts.
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 | 0.004 | 0.005 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.005 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.025 | 0.029 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.014 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 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".