Bibliographic record
Abstract
Commissions as Narratives: A Review EssayHedican, Edward J. Ipperwash: The Tragic Failure of Canada's Aboriginal Policy. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2013, 304 pages.Niezen, Ronald. Truth and Indignation: Canada's Truth and Reconciliation Commission on Indian Residential Schools. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2013, 173 pages.It goes without saying that as anthropologists we are interested in the study of human subjects and their interactions with each other. We are concerned with the mechanisms through which culture becomes a means of interpreting events for individuals and for communities; how local narratives compete with metanarratives; and how the narrative form can be used to create barriers or expand relationship. Narrative is an obvious focal point for our work because it acts as a gateway for individuals and communities to explain how they experience events, often without us having to experience the event ourselves. Two works that exemplify the use of narrative as a tool within anthropology are Edward J. Hedican's Ipperwash: The Tragic Failure of Canada's Aboriginal Policy and Ronal Niezen's Truth, and Indignation: Canada's Truth and Reconciliation Commission on Indian Residential Schools.Hedican and Niezen have written about two different inquiries into the relationship between Aboriginal peoples and two different levels of government, the Ipperwash Inquiry and the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC). Hedican has focused on a single event in which Dudley George was killed. Niezen's focus was, at the time of his writing, the ongoing TRC. Hedican's work does not shy away from dealing with the role of racism in the Province of Ontario and its institutions. He allows us to consider how the fiduciary responsibility of the Crown can be problematically unfulfilled because of racism. Hedican spends the first third of the book discussing Aboriginal policy and rights in Canada, focusing on historical and legal developments before exploring the Ipperwash Inquiry and the failure of Canada's Aboriginal policy.Niezen's work is a reflection on the relationship between Aboriginal people, the Crown, the churches that ran the schools and the symbolic construction of a particular version of that relationship. Niezen's analysis of how public performance of trauma can act to transfer blame from one actor (the Crown) to another (the Church) is interesting and important. He does this by his focus on the role of indignation as a response to the abuse of children at the hands of those whose care they were in (Niezen 2013:16-17). In this way, actors narrate the events they experienced and the audience converts the narrating actor into archetype characters within the structure imposed by the scope of the inquiry. The end result is a powerful force that the Crown uses to shape the direction of the inquiry's narrative.Common ground can be found in these two books not by considering the inquiry as a hearing, which ends a series of events, but by focusing on the potential effects of the inquiry on ongoing relationships. Hedican reminds his readers that these inquiries are expensive and, taking a cynical view, do nothing but buy a government more time and perhaps deflect attention away from real problems (Hedican 2013:203). His point is important. Certainly the Ipperwash Inquiry did not make the land claims process more efficient. The Provincial Crown has little authority to make such changes. In addition, as is evident by a lack of real changes, racism continues to be a problem in Canada. The TRC serves the role of collecting important personal narratives, but the focus on trauma circumscribes the finished product. In addition, the narrowed scope of the inquiry limits the legitimacy of anyone coming forward with a claim who did not attend a residential school as defined by the commission.However, I wish to focus on the construction of narratives, including Hedican's and Niezen's, as it relates to how metanarratives continue to be created about Aboriginal peoples. …
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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 | 0.008 | 0.028 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.010 | 0.018 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.003 | 0.008 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.013 | 0.016 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.007 | 0.005 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.007 | 0.002 |
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".