Mad dogs and (mostly) Englishmen: Colonial relations, commodities, and the fate of Inuit sled dogs
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The Qikiqtani Truth Commission was created by the Qikiqtani Inuit Association to examine events affecting Qikiqtanimiut between 1950 and 1980. Paramount among these was the fate of Inuit sled dogs. Dogs, unlike the snowmobiles that have replaced them, had no exchange value in a market economy. They enabled existential relations dependent upon traditional and personal skills rooted in Inuit culture and personality. It is understandable that their fate was identified by elders as an important focus of the Commission. The loss of dogs was both real and symbolic of cultural transformations that concern Inuit elders. As Inuit relocated to settlements, sled dogs became a liability for the Arctic administration. TheDog Ordinance of the Northwest Territories, intended to protect people from attacks, was at the same time a tool in the totalising agenda of a Canadian State committed to assimilating Inuit to Canadian norms, values, assumptions, rule of law, and settlement living. As Inuit moved to town in the 1950s and 1960s, theDog Ordinance of the Northwest Territorieswas used to redefine dogs—previously seen as essential to Inuit lifestyles, to keeping Inuit out of town, away from welfare and living independently—as liabilities and commodities. Their replacement by snowmobiles introduced Inuit to new commodity relations. As a commodity essential to hunting, snowmobiles pose a serious challenge to Inuit reciprocity andningiqtuq(sharing) relations andInuitQaujimajatuqangit(traditional knowledge).
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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 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.010 | 0.006 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.004 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 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".