Act to Control: The Grand General Indian Council, The Department of Indian Affairs, and the Struggle over the Indian Act in Ontario, 1850-1906.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This dissertation examines the development of the Indian Act in nineteenth-century Ontario within the context of Indigenous political response to the law. The Grand General Indian Council of Ontario was a cross-reserve political organization that met every two years after 1870 to review legislation affecting their communities and to urge the government to act on their recommendations. Representing various communities, nations, and legal frameworks, the Council was built on historic alliances between the Anishinaabe and the Haudenosaunee. Over the years, they drew on multiple forms of Indigenous law, as well as put forward a plethora of political strategies including engagement with and accommodation of some parts of the law itself. Understanding the plurality of legal frameworks and political thought put forward by the Council makes clear the diversity in how Indigenous leaders negotiated the shifting tactics of the government in their efforts to entrench control over reserve communities, as well as demonstrates how their political vision never neatly aligned with government goals. This dissertation also examines the changing legal mechanisms developed by the Department of Indian Affairs and the expansion of the Indian Agent system¬–often in relation to resistance– that ultimately undermined even the most accommodationist alternatives put forward by the Council. Each chapter traces one aspect of the Indian Act (or related legislation) that was of particular concern to both the Council and the Department of Indian Affairs: resource regulation, enfranchisement, reserve governance, inheritance, and the role of Indian Agents. I argue that the application of the Indian Act in Ontario can be understood as a series of contestations over local jurisdiction on reserves. These contestations make clear that while the development of the Indian Act has conventionally been understood as a top-down process, with law being passed in Ottawa being directly applied to reserves, this framing overlooks Indigenous political leaders who opposed the law or sought to have it altered to suit their needs, the difficulties that Indian Agents had in imposing the law, and how the law changed in response to these various struggles over local jurisdiction.
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 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 | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.024 | 0.017 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.007 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.006 | 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".