MétaCan
Menu
Back to cohort
Record W2065921631 · doi:10.1525/ahu.2003.28.2.168

A Gift of Words, a Gift of Truth: A Chipewyan Story of a Hard Winter

2003· article· en· W2065921631 on OpenAlexaboutno aff
David M. Smith

Bibliographic record

VenueAnthropology & Humanism · 2003
Typearticle
Languageen
FieldHealth Professions
TopicIndigenous Studies and Ecology
Canadian institutionsnot available
Fundersnot available
KeywordsLuckExplicationStorytellingRomanceNarrativeReciprocity (cultural anthropology)AestheticsPsychologySociologyEpistemologyPhilosophyPsychoanalysisLiteratureSocial psychologyArt

Abstract

fetched live from OpenAlex

This article focuses on a poignant story told by an elderly Chipewyan or Dené woman—Mrs. Nataway—about the hardest winter of her life. She wished to tell me this story to counter any excessively romantic apperception I might have attained of the traditional caribou‐hunting and fishing life in the northern Canadian transitional forest and barrenlands. In traditional Dené culture, storytelling, or giving gifts of words, is a holy activity that is a part of a broader system of reciprocity whereby knowledge/power cycles and the cosmos is prevented from reverting to chaos. In the manner of all elderly storytellers, Mrs. Nataway was concerned that my account of her words be true, since stories are inspired by the animals and inaccuracy can lead to being “out of luck” or having “bad luck” if they are offended. But a more basic concern is that knowledge cannot be empowering if it is not true. The truth is a central consideration in Chipewyan cosmology, wherein the universe is a moral not a mechanistic system. Mrs. Nataway was concerned with didactic, practical, and moral truth, and with the broader emotional truth that tends to be beyond explication. Her story could only be empowering to the extent that the listener could actually feel what the times of hardship were like when she was young, a time when nearly all of the Dené lived year‐round in the bush.

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)0.002
metaresearch head score (Gemma)0.005
Version: metacan-v3-hybrid-931329e0061cValidation status: machine_predicted_unvalidated
Candidate categoriesnone
Consensus categoriesnone
DomainCandidate signal: none · Consensus signal: none
Study designCandidate signal: Qualitative · Consensus signal: Qualitative
GenreCandidate signal: Empirical · Consensus signal: Empirical
Teacher disagreement score0.883
Threshold uncertainty score0.232

Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)

CategoryCodexGemma
Metaresearch0.0020.005
Meta-epidemiology (narrow)0.0010.001
Meta-epidemiology (broad)0.0010.000
Bibliometrics0.0010.001
Science and technology studies0.0310.018
Scholarly communication0.0060.006
Open science0.0010.008
Research integrity0.0030.007
Insufficient payload (model declined to judge)0.0020.000

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.

Opus teacher head0.049
GPT teacher head0.387
Teacher spread0.338 · 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 designQualitative
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

Citations0
Published2003
Admission routes1
Has abstractyes

Explore more

Same venueAnthropology & HumanismSame topicIndigenous Studies and EcologyFrench-language works237,207