Remembering the Trickster in Tomson Highway's <i>The Rez Sisters</i>
Why this work is in the frame
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Bibliographic record
Abstract
For critics of Tomson Highway's theatre, the character of Nanabush has become something of a distraction. Nanabush, the Cree and Ojibway trickster figure, plays a pivotal role in both of Highway's published plays, The Rez Sisters and its sequel, Dry Lips Oughta Move to Kapuskasing. In conjunction with analysis of Highway's political motives, the cultural weight of Nanabush has provided almost all the material for criticism on Highway's plays. With the notable exception of Helen Gilbert, Highway's critics tend to regard his plays as venues for political protest and to read his use of Nanabush as an assertion of the values of an intact and monolithic culture. Even those who recognize other strains in Highway's writing give an inordinate amount of prominence to the trickster. William Morgan's interview with Highway, for example, contains a great deal of information that has nothing to do with the trickster, including Highway's remarks on his training as a pianist and on Greek myth and classical drama. The title of the piece, however, "The Trickster and Native Theatre," proclaims these remarks to be comparatively insignificant. Perhaps it should not be surprising that many critics focus exclusively on his use of the trickster or that they treat his use of the trickster simply as a product of his politics, given Highway's material and his statements elsewhere. Such a reading, however, oversimplifies both Nanabush as a character and the plays as a whole.
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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 | 0.000 | 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 | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 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 it