Colonialism on Trial: Belonging, Adoption, and the Battle for Sovereignty
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This book advances a disruptive claim: the true foundation of sovereignty is belonging. States do not endure through force or law alone, but through their power to decide who counts as a member, who is permitted to enter, who may remain, who may return, and who is denied. From Canada to Israel and Palestine, from the United States to Australia, Aotearoa New Zealand, Latin America, and Africa, settler-colonial orders have mastered this power. They have narrowed Indigenous autonomy through treaties of containment, imposed blood quantum and registration regimes, elevated the rights of settlers while erasing the rights of the Indigenous, and turned belonging into the quiet machinery of domination. Against this architecture stands another tradition. Indigenous nations have long practiced adoption as renewal: a sovereign act of inclusion that sustains life, heals divisions, and expands kinship. Adoption is not a marginal custom but the heartbeat of survival through epidemic, displacement, and war. To reclaim adoption is to expose the fiction of colonial sovereignty, to assert that membership is not the exclusive prerogative of empire, and to open futures beyond its reach. This work advances three propositions. First, the control of membership is the hidden frontier of settler power. Second, Indigenous adoption endures as a sovereign practice that has been suppressed but not extinguished. Third, the politics of belonging is the decisive terrain on which the struggle for freedom will be won or lost. The chapters that follow combine law, history, and Indigenous philosophy to trace recurring global patterns, to distinguish inclusive from exclusive models of belonging, and to propose strategies for recovery without violence. This is not a detached analysis. It is written to unsettle, to contribute to a living struggle, and to invite readers to imagine sovereignty not as exclusion but as the expansive renewal of belonging.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
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 | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 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 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".