Indigenous Sovereignty and Canadian Drug Laws
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This dissertation examines the role of Canadian drug laws in the repression of Indigenous sovereignty and situates these laws within a broader framework of settler colonialism. It presents a detailed analysis of historical and contemporary drug legislation with the goal of illuminating the unique ways each piece of legislation works to further colonial objectives and suppress Indigenous rights. It focuses on three specific areas: cannabis, liquor, and tobacco regulations. Because each drug policy was developed within a unique social and historical context, this study uses various methods to analyse different data sets. Chapter One presents a historical analysis of cannabis laws from the Act to Prohibit the Improper Use of Opium and Other Drugs (1923) to the 2018 Cannabis Act and shows how these regulations undermine Indigenous sovereignty, exclude Indigenous peoples from economic benefits, and criminalize Indigenous resistance. Chapter Two uses newspaper data to explore how liquor laws from 1880 to 1920 helped construct white settler identity by criminalizing settlers who interacted with Indigenous people. Chapter Three critiques the Canadian tobacco industry's portrayal of the Mohawk tobacco trade as illicit, highlighting how the industry profits from advocating for the criminalization of Mohawk tobacco sovereignty. Grounded in Settler Colonial Theory, Critical Race Theory, and Indigenous Criminology, this dissertation illuminates the complex and sometimes contradictory nature of colonial power dynamics. This research contributes to a broader understanding of how criminal legislation continues to regulate and control Indigenous peoples, legitimizing the theft of Indigenous land and resources under the guise of drug prohibition.
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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 | 0.002 | 0.007 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.004 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.018 | 0.010 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.008 | 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".