Naturalizing Race Relations: Conservation, Colonialism, and Spectacle at the Banff Indian Days
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract: The Aboriginal population around Banff National Park was in many ways restricted from its boundaries shortly after its creation. However, Aboriginal people – in particular the Stoney (Nakoda) – would return en masse once a year to participate in the Banff Indian Days. While ethnographic expositions and spectacles have received much attention from social and cultural historians, the Banff Indian Days differ in that they occurred within an atmosphere saturated by an ideology of nature conservation. Drawing on photographs, advertising posters, archival materials, and oral recordings, this article argues that the Banff Indian Days were a physical manifestation of a much broader (indeed ongoing) dialogue, renegotiated and performed annually, between Natives and newcomers over the conditions under which Aboriginal peoples would be included within Canada's burgeoning parks and protected areas. Ultimately, the relationships between Natives and Indian Days organizers, park staff, Banff residents, and spectators resulting from this discussion were ambivalent. For non-Native organizers and spectators, the Indian Days provided a means to show how Natives could be safely, though only temporarily, restored to the park's environ. Enclosing Aboriginal participants within outsider representations and restricting them to supposedly regimented schedules, non-Natives believed Aboriginals posed a threat neither to established social hierarchies nor to the environment. Yet Native participants proved autonomous and unpredictable. They consistently mocked and subverted many of the race, class, and gender boundaries that Indian Days organizers never envisioned them crossing. In doing so, they attempted to expand their role within the national park system specifically and within a settler-colonial society more broadly.
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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 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.028 | 0.020 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.006 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.006 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| 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".