Make-Believing White Civility: Historical Re-enactments at Fort Langley, British Columbia
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In 1858 Governor James Douglas proclaimed British Columbia a colony at Fort Langley before an audience of Hudson’s Bay Company officials, workers, and Indigenous leaders. The Proclamation dissolved the Hudson’s Bay Company trading monopoly and, while claiming to protect Indigenous lands, actually asserted British ownership of their territory. In the present, Fort Langley National Historic Site holds regular re-enactments of the Proclamation through their educational programs targeting local schools. The script for these re-enactments, authored by Parks Canada staff, allows schoolchildren to role-play a scenario in which James Douglas proclaims British Columbia a colony to protect Indigenous lands, without explicitly staging the negative consequences for Indigenous peoples that the claiming of those lands caused. I link these two events, the 1858 Proclamation and the present-day re-enactments, by comparing the script’s content to its historical and contemporary context. I conclude that the Proclamation re-enactments become performances of recolonization when Parks Canada deceptively presents its own wry civility (Daniel Coleman). The 1858 Proclamation’s embedded civility, and its repetition and reformation in the contemporary script, the production process, and the surrounding social structure, allows colonial ideology to be physicalized, invested, and passed on to and through children at the Fort Langley National Historic Site.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
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 | 0.001 | 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 | 0.003 | 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) | 0.001 | 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 teacher head, 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".