Brightening the Covenant Chain: Aboriginal Treaty\nMeanings in Law and History After Marshall
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The decision of the Supreme Court of Canada in R. v. Marshall raises some difficult questions about the interpretation of Crown-Aboriginal treaties, especially treaties dating from the eighteenth century. The Court acknowledged that the treaty context is important to establishing the meaning of treaty texts, and Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal perspectives must be considered. As a result, judges must have regard to historical analyses of Crown-Aboriginal relations when interpreting these old treaties. In this article, the author explores some of the complex theoretical problems that such legal-historical analyses create, focusing in particular upon the possibility that lawyers and judges may reach very different understandings about the meanings of old treaties than historians. As a vehicle for exploring this problem, the author considers competing approaches to the definition of the 'Covenant Chain' treaties. He argues that although British and Aboriginal peoples appeared to define the effect of the Covenant Chain on Aboriginal sovereignty very differently, British officials always acknowledged the Aboriginal perspective. Examination of evolving attitudes about the Covenant Chain in three separate periods (1763-65, 1783-94 and 1830-60) confirm that sometimes this official acknowledgement was a subordinate one and at other times it was elevated to a dominant position. The author concludes by considering whether legal and historical interpretations about shifting approaches to this treaty may lead to different understandings about Aboriginal sovereignty or, in other words, about the inherent right of Aboriginal self-government.
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 | 0.003 | 0.005 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.022 | 0.020 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.010 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.004 | 0.007 |
| 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".