Birds Hill Park, the Dakota Eagle Sundance, and the Sweatlodge: Establishing a Sacred Site in a Provincial Park
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Little scholarly analysis has been made of the processes involved in returning Indigenous sacred locales to contemporary religious usage. In this paper, a historical and descriptive sketch is provided of the institutional and personal systems in place in the recovery of a Dakota sundance site in Birds Hill Provincial Park. After several meetings with various officials from the Manitoba Department of Conservation the White Buffalo Spiritual Society was given permission to hold a sundance ceremony at Birds Hill Provincial Park, located approximately twenty kilometers north of the City of Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada. From 2000 until 2007 an annual sundance and regular sweatlodge ceremonies were held at a site in the Park selected by members of the White Buffalo Spiritual Society in consultation with Conservation officials. This article outlines significant events in the process of establishing and maintaining a sacred space in a Provincial Park, introduces the reader to the Dakota Eagle sundance, and notes the reasons why the sundance and sweatlodge ceremonies are viewed as important for the individual and community well-being.
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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 | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.018 | 0.007 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.003 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| 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".