"What Makes the Indian Tick?" The Influence of Social Sciences on Canada's Indian Policy, 1947-1964
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The continuing objective of state policy towards First Nations in Canada has been their assimilation into the dominant society. Until World War II the strategy had been to subjugate them through transparently harsh statutory and administrative measures. After the war, a new ostensibly more humane approach to assimilation was introduced. An analysis of archival documents from the Canadian Department of Indian Affairs reveals the role of the social sciences in influencing this approach. Knowledge from the social sciences, applied to Indian policy, reflected the biases of modern liberalism. The social sciences pointed to the required direction of Indian adaptation — the market, individualism, self-reliance, and the family — and to what aspects of Indian culture had to change — collectivism, extended kinship, and gendered roles reflective of traditional rather than modern cultures. Although these state policies enjoyed wide public support, First Nations refused to be mere objects of science and research.
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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 | 0.002 | 0.006 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.005 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.035 | 0.014 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.009 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.006 | 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".