‘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 distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 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 teacher head, 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".