Did they go native? Representations of first encounters and personal interrelations with First Nations Canadians in the writings of Susanna Moodie and Catharine Parr Traill
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Between 1836 and 1852, Susanna Moodie and Catharine Parr Traill, two British gentlewomen who had emigrated to Canada, published accounts of their lives in the backwoods of Canada for a British audience. Descriptions of their encounters with their Native neighbours, more particularly women, are prominent in their texts. A gradual sense of intimacy permeates the writings, battling with the prejudices of the times. I propose to read Traill’s main work, The Backwoods of Canada, her 1848 sketch, “A Visit to the Camp of the Chippewa Indians”, and Susanna Moodie’s Roughing it in the Bush as emblematic of the “discourses of difference” that Sara Mills identifies in nineteenth century texts by female travel writers. I would like to suggest that Moodie and Traill, in their own way, “went native”. Echoes with later texts such as Canadian Crusoes and Pearls and Pebbles will also be traced to show how the texts admit to an Indian presence that is more than merely exotic, and allow the voice of the First Nations Canadians to be heard, albeit on a small scale. Simultaneously, the texts also inscribe their empowerment.
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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 | 0.000 | 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 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 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".