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Record W146988887

Sacred Ground and Holy Water

2006· article· en· W146988887 on OpenAlexvenueno aff
Kevin Lyn Fox

Bibliographic record

VenueCanadian ethnic studies · 2006
Typearticle
Languageen
FieldHealth Professions
TopicIndigenous Studies and Ecology
Canadian institutionsnot available
Fundersnot available
KeywordsHistoryArchaeologyOceanographyGeographyAncient historyGeology
DOInot available

Abstract

fetched live from OpenAlex

The next time you eat salmon, you may see an apparition: a barefoot warrior with conical spruce hat, grizzly-bear-tattooed chest, and mother-of-pearl-studded cape. He's no hallucination; he's a Haida watchman, standing guard over your dinner and, perhaps, our planet. How well I remember my encounter with this guardian spirit. We were sailing through dense fog on a drizzly night--farther north than I'd ever been. Cloud ceiling hung low enough to make you hunch. Cloud walls, held at bay by surging and dimming deck lamps, enclosed an eerie space. A remote coastline of moss-choked forests and deep fjords loomed without warning, then vanished without explanation. As I gripped the rail in nervous silence, my animalistic senses heightened to pick apart the sounds--ship noises, sea noises, other noises. How many creaky boats had hugged this ragged shoreline? How many timid souls had braved this fogbound strait? First came the Haida. From ancient times, these philosophical craftsmen carved their world up into spiritual realms of earth, sea, and sky. With lofty vision, they divided themselves into raven and eagle clans. Then, lowering their gaze, they set about the tasks of life on earth, albeit the sacred earth of the islands called Haida Gwaii. Having duly noted that nature provided four seasons and two genders, the Haida went with the flow, both tidal and menstrual. In autumn, the women gathered kelp, roe, roots, berries, mushrooms, shellfish, clover leaves, and crabapples. The men, with bigger muscles and shorter attention spans, chased deer sauntering down to drink and caught salmon swimming up to spawn. In winter, the community hibernated in post-and-beam, cedar-plank long houses. Outside, dramatic red and black murals covered the facades. Front-and-center totem poles sported fierce family crests, with the bottom creature's gaping mouth forming an oval door to the smoky, fire-lit interior. Inside, the ambiance included aromatherapy (drying salmon hung from rafters) and soft rock music (sounds of malleable, black argillite being sculpted, along with interludes of grandma and grandpa getting busy under a blanket). One can hardly overestimate the glee when spring arrived. Fertile women pierced babies' ears, tattooed children's bodies, and bathed in rushing streams, ice-cold water pouring through long, dark hair, cascading over engorged voluptuousness and funneling down into ... well, you can take it from there. Meanwhile, testosterone-laden men felled towering cedars, hollowed out canoes, and prepared to expand dominion over the third realm, the sea. Throughout the summer, these ambitious mariners crisscrossed Hecate Strait, trading for eulachon oil to enrich their diet and raiding for captive slaves to enrich their economy. As I peered over the railing, straining to glimpse nearby land through thick mist and mammoth waves, the enormity of their nautical cajones shamed me. Next came the white boys. I say boys because these fur-trading expeditions generally left the women at home. By the time they reached Haida Gwaii, the sailors hadn't erected their totem poles at the oval entrances to their favourite long houses in quite some time. The rise of hostilities with the Haida might be less surprising than the lack of mutiny on the ships. British captain George Dixon first circumnavigated Haida Gwaii. He then traded for otter pelts at the village of Sgan Gwaii. (Today, this spot harbours a mystical cluster of leaning, weathered totem poles, constituting a United Nations World Heritage Site commonly called Ninstints.) Soon thereafter, American captain John Kendrick showed up drunk and careless, let the Haida pilfer his laundry and seize his ship, then massacred them in return. (Curiously, American connections also accompanied the recent Haida art renaissance with Bill Reid [son of an American father/Haida mother] and Robert Davidson [born in America/raised on Haida Gwaii] at the forefront. …

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 distilled prediction

Teacher imitation

Not 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.

metaresearch head score (Codex)0.000
metaresearch head score (Gemma)0.000
Version: codex-gemma-dda1882f352aValidation status: machine_predicted_unvalidated
Candidate categoriesScience and technology studies
Consensus categoriesnone
DomainCandidate signal: none · Consensus signal: none
Study designCandidate signal: Observational · Consensus signal: none
GenreCandidate signal: Empirical · Consensus signal: Empirical
Teacher disagreement score0.697
Threshold uncertainty score0.998

Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category

CategoryCodexGemma
Metaresearch0.0000.000
Meta-epidemiology (narrow)0.0000.000
Meta-epidemiology (broad)0.0000.000
Bibliometrics0.0000.000
Science and technology studies0.0030.000
Scholarly communication0.0000.000
Open science0.0000.000
Research integrity0.0000.000
Insufficient payload (model declined to judge)0.0000.000

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.

Opus teacher head0.161
GPT teacher head0.428
Teacher spread0.267 · how far apart the two teachers sit on this one work
Validation statusscore_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it

Classification

machine, unvalidated

Machine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.

Study designObservational
Domainnot available
GenreEmpirical

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".

Quick stats

Citations0
Published2006
Admission routes1
Has abstractyes

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