Reserved responsibilities: a comparative analysis of settler colonial narratives of Canadian federalism and sub-national jurisdictional responsibility for status First Nations peoples living on-reserve in Manitoba, British Columbia, and the Northwest Territories
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This study analyzes the role settler colonialism has had on Canadian federalism. It argues that a governance relationship between provincial and territorial governments, as sub-nationals of the Canadian federal government, does exist with status First Nations peoples living on-reserve. This can be evidenced in the Constitution (British North America Act, 1867 (BNA Act) and later the Canadian Constitution Act, 1982), legislation, case law, and political and public administration practices of Canada. Yet this relationship is most often overlooked in Canada’s prevailing narrative of federalism in favour of the more straightforward relationship between the federal government and status First Nations peoples living on-reserve. This narrative of federal jurisdictional responsibility ignores traditional Indigenous governments and Indigenous sovereignty, which has allowed the subnationals to increase their presence on-reserve in ways that go unmonitored or evade responsibility. This dissertation principally relies on two main bodies of primary sources: interviews and budgetary and annual government reports. To a lesser degree, archival sources were used in this study. There are four levels of comparative analysis: between the settler colonial state and Indigenous nations, between Canadian notions of federalism and Indigenous-related policies, between the Canadian federal government and the provinces and territories, and between 2 provincial sub-nationals (Manitoba and British Columbia) and one territorial sub-national (Northwest Territories). The study draws on three overlapping bodies of theoretical literature: colonial studies (including, imperial, settler, and de-colonial studies), Indigenous-centred scholarship, and Canadian public administration. This thesis concludes that Canada, as a settler colonial society, has a narrative of federalism that evokes neo-colonial tendencies. Federalism has been used as an enabling structure for the federal government to marginalize Indigenous peoples’ land ownership and sovereignty and create jurisdiction for the sub-nationals to control Indigenous peoples’ lands and circumvent Indigenous sovereignty. This is not a convenient accident: the framework of federalism and jurisdictional responsibility for Indigenous-related matters was set during an era of shifting from imperial to settler colonialism, and this framework continues to support settler colonialism which, in many ways, operates as neo-colonial. By looking closely at the evidence of neo-colonialism in Canadian federalism, opportunities for de-colonialism and Indigenous sovereignty become evident.
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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 | 0.004 | 0.008 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.004 | 0.007 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.044 | 0.020 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.009 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.006 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 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".