Criminal law on the aboriginal plainsthe First Nations and the first criminal court in the North-West Territories, 1870-1903
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This study undertakes an in-depth analysis of the relationship between the First Nations and the criminal law in the 'Saskatchewan' region of the North-West Territories, taking as its temporal point of departure the creation of the Territories in 1870. Through data derived from criminal court records from Hugh Richardson's tenure on the territorial bench (1876–1903), this study analyses the role of Canadian criminal law in a watershed period of social and legal transformation in and for the lives of the First Nations. The dissertation critically engages with discourses of criminalization in the historiography and calls for greater precision in the use of 'criminalization', where distinctions between criminal law and other forms of law are recognized. Specifically, it argues that offences under the Indian Act offences did not criminalize but rather 'Indianized' the First Nations. They were prosecuted as "Indians" - not as criminals - for not conforming to the behaviour required of Indians by the Indian Act. The dissertation departs from a conventional approach to criminal law, as forms of Aboriginal participation, rather than legal categories, were used to identify themes. Through an analysis of the criminal cases where Aboriginal people were prosecuted for criminal offences, as opposed to offences under the Indian Act, and in cases where the relationship between Government Indian policy and the administration of criminal justice can be discerned, the dissertation demonstrates the importance of attention to the specificity of different legal forms and actors and the relationship between them. The study has also found that Richardson's court could be a site of resistance to government policy by different actors, including Aboriginal people and even Richardson himself, as he did not always acquiesce to the entreaties of government officials, even as he admonished the Aboriginal people before him. Aboriginal participation in the criminal court is also analysed through court records in which Aboriginal persons were informants, victims or witnesses in criminal prosecutions. The dissertation re-situates criminal law within the law-state relation and concludes that criminal law operated in complex and contradictory ways that included the mediation as well as enforcement of relations of inequality.
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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 | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.006 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.014 | 0.010 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.003 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| 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 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".