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Record W2043697794 · doi:10.3138/md.45.2.259

Remembering the Trickster in Tomson Highway's <i>The Rez Sisters</i>

2002· article· en· W2043697794 on OpenAlexvenueno aff
Lina Perkins

Bibliographic record

VenueModern Drama · 2002
Typearticle
Languageen
FieldArts and Humanities
TopicPoetry Analysis and Criticism
Canadian institutionsnot available
Fundersnot available
KeywordsTricksterMythologyPoliticsCharacter (mathematics)DramaNothingLiteratureAssertionArtHistoryMedia studiesSociologyLawPhilosophyPolitical science

Abstract

fetched live from OpenAlex

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.

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 machine prediction

Teacher imitation

Not 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.

metaresearch head score (Codex)0.001
metaresearch head score (Gemma)0.002
Version: metacan-v3-hybrid-931329e0061cValidation status: machine_predicted_unvalidated
Candidate categoriesnone
Consensus categoriesnone
DomainCandidate signal: none · Consensus signal: none
Study designCandidate signal: Theoretical or conceptual · Consensus signal: none
GenreCandidate signal: Empirical · Consensus signal: none
Teacher disagreement score0.064
Threshold uncertainty score0.127

Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)

CategoryCodexGemma
Metaresearch0.0010.002
Meta-epidemiology (narrow)0.0000.000
Meta-epidemiology (broad)0.0000.000
Bibliometrics0.0000.000
Science and technology studies0.0060.005
Scholarly communication0.0050.002
Open science0.0000.002
Research integrity0.0020.003
Insufficient payload (model declined to judge)0.0180.003

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.

Opus teacher head0.042
GPT teacher head0.219
Teacher spread0.176 · how far apart the two teachers sit on this one work
Validation statusscore_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it

Classification

machine, unvalidated

Machine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.

The models applied no category: nothing in the taxonomy fit this work.
Study designTheoretical or conceptual
Domainnot available
GenreEmpirical

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".

Quick stats

Citations3
Published2002
Admission routes1
Has abstractyes

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