'House of no spirit' : an architectural history of the Indian Residential School in British Columbia
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This dissertation investigates an often disregarded aspect of the history of the Indian Residential School (IRS) system in British Columbia (BC): namely, the designs, aims, and uses of its architecture. Central to the dissertation is the contention that the IRS should not be considered a ―school‖ per se, as this label suggests not only kinship with a broad spectrum of institutions, but also intimates a place of salubrity and self-improvement. On the contrary, the study evinces the particular nature of the IRS: to disrupt the formation of genealogies between these structures and other modern institutions. This emphasis on distinctions—between the IRS and other modern buildings—is explored through a comparative architectural topology, meant to reveal the precise function of the IRS: to target certain colonized Indigenous subjects, to effect particular rationalities of colonial rule, and to produce distinct spaces within which to enforce new behavioural norms. Moreover, I argue that the IRS comprised places without place, non-places where Indigenous children, by design, were meant to no longer feel at home in their own societies, cultures, communities, and families. In addition to rethinking IRS architecture in BC, the study also surveys several conflicting opinions on how—or if at all—to commemorate the institutional remnants of this complex and, often, painful history. Variously repurposed, neglected, or demolished, the former IRS pose several problems, in terms of determining their historical value and their place among existing national, provincial, and regional sites of memory. I analyse the official processes by which material and intangible traces of the past become bearers of heritage value. Following this, I investigate in depth the cluster of issues that trouble attempts to recognize and preserve the ―difficult heritage‖ of the IRS.
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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 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.005 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.021 | 0.009 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.010 | 0.001 |
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".