"They Punish Murderers, Thieves, Traitors and Sorcerers": Aboriginal Criminal Justice as Reported by Early French Observers
Bibliographic record
Abstract
A common theme in the writings of European explorers, historians, and religious emissaries who were among the first to comment on the inhabitants of the western hemisphere was the absence in Aboriginal society of any concept of law. In some cases these early commentators may not have interpreted what they saw correctly, and they used French words with specific legal definitions that were not relevant in the context of the behaviour they attempted to describe. Evidence from their writings, especially those of the Jesuits, shows that there was in fact law among the Native peoples of the northeast, and particularly criminal law, albeit of a different kind and process than French law. In France, with retribution or deterrence as the objective of the judicial system, the individual alone was responsible for his or her actions and suffered punishment accordingly. In contrast, apart from cases of sorcery or betrayal, which were punishable by death, Aboriginal justice sought to restore social cohesion and harmony among the group by restitution, which was a collective responsibility.
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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 | 0.010 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.024 | 0.010 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.004 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.004 | 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".