‘To honour our most fundamental relationship’ : exercising Gwich’in rights and responsibilities to Caribou in a transboundary context
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In this thesis, I examine how overlapping layers of law mediate the relationship between Gwich’in and the caribou that have sustained them for millennia. I address Gwich’in legal responsibilities to caribou within the Gwich’in legal order, practical challenges arising from the imposed Alaska-Yukon border and ensuing State laws, and the role of rights-based legal framings in Gwich’in efforts to uphold their legal responsibilities to caribou despite those challenges. Many Gwich’in consider themselves bound to protect the caribou. I frame these protective responsibilities as legal ones and make the case for taking Gwich'in law seriously as a binding source of legal obligations. I argue that State-based laws have complicated Gwich’in efforts to uphold these legal responsibilities, and I offer a Gwich’in-centric historical account of the border’s cumulative effects on Gwich’in lifeways. I consider domestic legal tools’ potential to mitigate constraints on Gwich’in-caribou relations and conclude that they are largely inadequate. I then address Gwich’in advocacy against proposed fossil fuel development in the caribou calving ground, including border-related complications, and I argue that Gwich’in rhetoric has the power to disrupt the border’s normative legitimacy. Finally, I consider the extent to which international human rights law mechanisms can help Gwich’in fulfill their legal responsibilities to caribou. I examine the potential utility of two human rights mechanisms Gwich’in have not yet employed, and I discuss the potential drawbacks of relying on largely unenforceable mechanisms that may tacitly legitimize the colonial power dynamics they aim to alleviate. Despite these systemic issues, I encourage Gwich’in to consider using these mechanisms as part of their advocacy toolkit.
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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 | 0.009 | 0.012 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.012 | 0.071 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.011 | 0.016 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.010 |
| Research integrity | 0.005 | 0.007 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.006 | 0.001 |
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".