Rooting Ourselves in Earth: Towards a Theory of Territorial Decolonization
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Canada is founded on a contradiction: it claims sovereign jurisdiction over Indigenous people, territories, and jurisdictions without their consent and despite their refusal. This contradiction is maintained through laws, policies, institutions, and norms that continually colonize Indigenous people, communities, knowledges, and lands. Indigenous and settler scholars argue that resolving this contradiction requires decolonization—changing laws, policies, institutions, and norms that maintain settler supremacy—and Indigenization—recentring Indigenous knowledge, institutions, and practices. This is the work of Indigenous and settler peoples in Canada. This thesis, in dialogue with Indigenous philosophies, investigates the implications of these calls for territorial justice in settler states. Decolonization and Indigenization raise several related philosophical questions in these contexts. First are questions concerning relationships between self-determining communities with distinct systems of law and governance whose jurisdictions overlap, including what constitutes mutual respect between these communities, how their jurisdictions should be exercised in relation to each other, and the kinds of transformational processes required to realise these relationships in settler states. Second are questions concerning how accountability is maintained in political relationships over time, its role in restoring relationships, and how agents respond to demands for accountability. Third are questions concerning mutual understanding between communities with diverse lifeways and the processes required to achieve them. I argue that territorial justice in settler states requires rooting the settler lifeway in the principles of the Earth: mutual respect, reciprocity, and renewal. This process will involve sustained intercultural dialogues between settler and Indigenous peoples and philosophies to develop a mutual understanding of the concepts, values, and norms that express the value of mutual respect, reciprocity, and renewal in these unique relationships. Developing and maintaining these relationships necessitates an active and ongoing practice of relational accountability, realised through the reconceptualization of jurisdictional rights as gifts between interdependent communities. This broader argument about territorial decolonization is developed through three interrelated sub-arguments about the role of mutual understanding and relational accountability in political, normative, and disciplinary relationships.
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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 | 0.003 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.009 | 0.068 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.008 | 0.008 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.006 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 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".