“A Portrait of This Country”: Whiteness, Indigeneity, Multiculturalism and the Vancouver Opening Ceremonies
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In this article, I examine how the performance of Canadian identity in the Vancouver 2010 Olympic Winter Games opening ceremonies reflects the persistence of whiteness at the core of Canada’s multicultural identity. To this end, I analyze the cultural components of the Vancouver ceremonies and the coverage of this spectacle by Canadian television broadcaster CTV. This event is worthy of study because it marks a crucial moment of nation-building and representation for the Canadian nation before the world. In this formative and performative moment, organizers did not foreground multiculturalism as central to Canadian identity— problematic as liberal multiculturalism may be in the context of a structurally inequitable society. Instead, they chose to portray whiteness as the core of Canadian identity. While there is a significant acknowledgment of Canada’s Indigenous peoples in the ceremonies, this should not be seen as a celebration of diversity. Rather, Indigineity is appropriated as the origin of a national teleology that culminates in whiteness. Indeed, by locating the nation’s origins in Indigenous societies, the claim can be made that Canada is essentially multicultural, and thus, that no further representation or acknowledgment of non-white people is necessary.
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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 | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.028 | 0.010 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.007 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| 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".