#19 - Specific Reference, Must Be True

[powerscoreQasker]

I was able to eliminate A, B, D, and E, but I didn't understand the question stem enough to feel truly confident in selecting C. Should I interpret "The passage most supports which..." as requiring the strength of Must Be True or a logical inference, or that of "most strongly supported" - that is, strongly supported but not necessarily logically proven?
This tripped me up because the passage mentions individuals who've engaged in lawsuits about movable property, and answer choice C mentions tribes that have engaged in lawsuits. I wasn't sure if the passage/basic knowledge gives enough information to equate individuals and tribes or to conclude, for example, that

• tribes engage in litigation --> at least one individual engages in litigation

which, if assumed, would prove C. If that conditional statement is not assumed, C is not proven, though still strongly supported.
What's the correct way to approach this? Thanks in advance.

[Rachael Wilkenfeld]

Hi powerscoreQasker,

The correct way to read that is as a most strongly supported. Answer choice (C) is supported by the information stating that all cases in which Native Canadians have made claims about moveable property they have used the concept of collective ownership. It's also not clear that the passage is talking about individuals making claims versus the tribe making the claim. The passage uses the plural in talking about those making a claim, supporting the idea that it's the tribe as a whole versus an individual.

Hope that helps.

[powerscoreQasker]

Thanks for the reply - it does help. Good point about how it mentions "native Canadians," not specifically "individuals." That makes C seem more strongly supported, to me at least.

I'm still not sure I agree that the use of "native Canadians" supports the idea that the passage is referring to tribes engaging in litigation, since that "native Canadians" would also be a natural way to describe individuals engaging in litigation - "native Canadians" literally denotes people, not tribes. The passage is pretty consistent in the use of "native Canadians," rather than "native Canadian communities" or "tribes," to describe the people who are engaging in the lawsuits. If I'm correct, it doesn't say outright that "tribes" are suing anybody; the closest it comes to that is the interpolation of a statement about what "tribes" traditionally thought in lines 25-28 between two mentions of "native Canadians." So I'm not sure the passage itself gives us evidence about whether "native Canadians" means individuals or tribes. I could definitely be missing something, though. At the very least, the passage suggests that the tribes' traditional viewpoints are informing these lawsuits and will be accepted more in the future.

[Rachael Wilkenfeld]

The other way you can think about it, Qasker, is to take the information in the passage that the individuals are considering themselves acting on behalf of the tribe. They consider it community property, so even if they are not the tribe as an institution suing, they would still be considered the tribe suing.

We can think of it similarly to when someone describes a family suing someone. Let's imagine a family with an adult and four children. A bulldozer accidently demolishes their house instead of the neighbors, and the family sues. Even though the person actually initiating the suit is the adult, we could still describe it as "the family" suing as the adult would be acting on behalf of the family as a whole.

Hope that helps