Bibliographic record
Abstract
We are not the first observers to recognize that the WDS emerged as part of the Midwinter Feast at some point around 1800. Beauchamp (1885: 235; 1888: 198; 1895: 198; cf. Tooker 1970: 102-103) recognized the WDS as a recent addition to midwinter rituals. Perhaps Beauchamp's 1892 summary says it best:In its essential feature of sacrifice the white dog feast seems quite modem, but in point of time [season of the year] it corresponds with the old Dream Feast, taking its place and retaining some of its features.Beauchamp 1892: 85Boyle (1898), Waugh (1916: 133), and Lloyd (1922: 261-263) all agreed with Beauchamp. Waugh had spent time from 1912 to 1915 among the Iroquois of Ontario, Quebec and New York, when the WDS was ending, but he, as those before him, must have read enough of the literature to reach a similar conclusion. Waugh believed the sacrifice to be a survival of earlier dog feasts, whereas we might call it an evolutionary transformation.Lloyd (1922) listed the only eight references in which he could find any form of dog sacrifice anywhere in the Northeast that predated the period of Handsome Lake. Lloyd's listing includes a number of errors, but the overall pattern is the same. Dog sacrifice existed in forms that may be ancestral to what emerged after 1800. Several of these accounts also are mentioned in the Whipple Report (1889: 419, 425,448; see under New York [State] Assembly). All of them have been summarized or detailed in this volume.Reconstructing Origins: Why Two Dogs?The very first known or prototypic WDS was reported by Kirkland in 1800. He noted the killing or sacrifice by strangulation of pure white dogs. Cord strangulation, often specified, does not mar or damage the pelt or skin, nor stain it with blood. Kirkland indicates that three dogs were killed, only two of which were cremated. Reports of the sacrifice of two dogs are common in early accounts. Fenton's recognition (1944: 161) that the offering of two dogs reflected the gifts of the moieties to the Creator, reflecting the roles of moiety divisions in these feasts, has been noted only by Tooker (1970: 41) but not pursued by other scholars. We've pointed out that Kirkland's account in 1800 clearly specifies that two wampum bands worn by the sacrificed dog, hung up to rot, represented the moieties of the Oneida. The decline in traditional Iroquoian kinship, and a shift to patrilineal descent, appears correlated with a loss of functional duality in each of these cultures. The sacrifice of a single dog may be one of the most evident indications of the decline in the kinship system with which Lewis Morgan, fortunately, became so concerned. The evidence for moiety participation in the early WDS is strongest in Kirkland's account, where we are not placing undue emphasis on the significance of cooking of two dogs. The number sacrificed may be another element of the rite that was improvised by the elders or reflects peculiarities of the situation of any specific year.Two observations on native Iroquoian culture by outside observers (Sir William Johnson and later C. A. Hirschfelder) reveal aspects of overall stability in various implicit designs for living that should be considered here. Some basic elements of culture may have remained unchanged despite hundreds of years of European contacts. The earlier of these two observation dates from 1771, while the other is more recent; yet each reveals why small changes (or perhaps variations) within the culture can be irrelevant to the overall trajectory of change. In 1771 a letter written by Sir William Johnson and pointed out by William Starna (2008: 300) contains observations that reveal Sir William as a brilliant ethnographer. Sir William's observations of the differences in the customs and manners of the distinct tribes of the Five Nations are as follow:In all inquiries of this sort we should Distinguish between the more remote Tribes & those Indns who from having been next to our settlemls for sev1 years,
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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 | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| 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 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".