The True Northwest Passage: Explorers in Anglo-Canadian Nationalist Narratives
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The Northwest Passage has always held a symbolic role in the mythology of Canadian nationalism, but the imagined geography of which it is a part has changed drastically over time. From Confederation to the present day, explorers have been described as the first builders of the Canadian nation. But in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Canadian historians showed little interest in the Far North. Instead, they were fascinated by the story of westward exploration. They created a romantic grand narrative celebrating the explorers who mapped out the path later followed by the Canadian Pacific Railway. For them, this westward path-the "true Northwest passage"-led both to the Pacific and to Canadian nationhood. Arctic exploration came to the forefront of nationalist concerns only after this paradigm had been established. In the earlier part of the twentieth century, British explorers like Sir John Franklin were also seen primarily as nation-builders. In the second half of the century such claims were re-evaluated. However, the romantic nationalist tradition has persisted, though in an altered form, among the writers who prefer new Arctic heroes such as John Rae and Samuel Hearne. These explorers are now thought to have shown the way to a very different "true Northwest passage" through their sympathetic understanding of the northern landscape and its Aboriginal inhabitants. This article analyzes both the continuities and the differences between the old and new imagined geographies of Canada
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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 | 0.007 | 0.008 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.005 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.050 | 0.048 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.018 | 0.008 |
| Open science | 0.003 | 0.010 |
| Research integrity | 0.004 | 0.006 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 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 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".