The Iron Creek Meteorite: The Curious History of the Manitou Stone and the Claim for its Repatriation
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Canada's Iron Creek meteorite, a 320 lb (145 kg) Group IIIAB medium octahedrite iron, was long venerated by the First Nations in Alberta as their sacred Manitou Stone, but it was taken without authority from them by Methodist missionaries in 1866. That began the meteorite's long odyssey, as it was transferred first to the Methodist Mission in Victoria (now Pakan) Alberta; then to the Red River Mission in Winnipeg, Manitoba; then to the Wesleyan Methodist Church's Mission Rooms in Toronto, Ontario; then to Victoria College in Cobourg, Ontario; then to the campus of the University of Toronto in Toronto, Ontario; then to the Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto; and finally to the Provincial Museum of Alberta (now the Royal Alberta Museum) in Edmonton. In recent years, a First Nations movement to repatriate the meteorite to a place near its original find site has been initiated. As of now, the meteorite remains on display at the Royal Alberta Museum's Syncrude Gallery of Aboriginal Culture, where it is a prized showpiece. The present paper explores the curious history and cultural significance of this fabled meteorite, its long odyssey, the issues surrounding the claims for its repatriation, the Royal Alberta Museum's present policy, and a possible way forward.
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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 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.061 | 0.025 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.012 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.007 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.005 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.011 | 0.001 |
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".