Peyote on the Prairies: Religion, Scientists, and Native-Newcomer Relations in Western Canada
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In October 1956, a peyote ceremony took place at the Red Pheasant reserve in Saskatchewan. Organized by the Native American Church, the ceremony featured the use of peyote, a psychedelic substance from a cactus traditionally found in Mexico. Its use among Canadian Native peoples in the first half of the twentieth century had signalled concerns about American influences, but by the 1950s the issue escalated into a debate about spirituality, medicine, and Native-newcomer relations. The federal government by this time had embraced an ethos of multiculturalism, which meant that some officials tolerated the peyote ceremony as a legitimate Indigenous ritual. Local authorities, however, regarded peyotism as an abusive and dangerous ceremony and sought to criminalize its practice. The ensuing conflicts over how to handle the rise of peyotism on the Prairies forms the basis of this study. This essay unpacks this complex set of debates by explaining how various players—scientists, journalists, Native participants, police, and government officials- interpreted peyotism. The authors suggest that the peyote ceremony tested the limits of the federal government’s shift towards treating Aboriginal Canadians as immigrants.
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 | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.039 | 0.013 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.008 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 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".