“But Now Things Have Changed”: Marius Barbeau and the Politics of Amerindian Identity
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This essay examines Marius Barbeau's early-twentieth-century Huron-Wyandot ethnography as a case study in the history of Canadian anthropology and in Canadian cultural history. It examines how Barbeau's ethnographic research became part of a broader, inherently political process, through which an Amerindian identity was remade as part of the ethnographic project. Barbeau, a noted Canadian anthropologist, studied and collected Huron-Wyandot culture from 1911 until 1914. Working within the salvage paradigm, he rejected the idea that historic-era cultural adaptions could constitute part of an“authentic” Huron-Wyandot culture. For Barbeau cultural adaptations or developments signified only cultural decay. By representing Huron-Wyandot culture in this fashion, Barbeau not only challenged Huron and Wyandot conceptions of their culture but created a standard of cultural authenticity to which the existing Huron and Wyandot cultures could not conform. This led Barbeau to conclude that the Huron had been assimilated into white society: the Huron nation, in effect, no longer existed. The Canadian state readily agreed with this conclusion, using Barbeau's research to bolster its own plan to disestablish a Huron reserve and forcibly enfranchise its population, thereby unilaterally abolishing their Amerindian status. Barbeau's Huron-Wyandot ethnography illustrates, this essay concludes, how anthropology became a point of intercultural contact and conflict and a component of aboriginal-white relations in Canada in the first decades of the twentieth century.
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 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 | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 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; both teacher heads agree on what is shown here.
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".