Fur Trade Daughters of the Oregon Country: Students of the Sisters of Notre Dame de Namur, 1850
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Ethnicity, religion, class, and gender are important elements in determining the cultural texture of society. This study examines these components at an important junction in the history of the Pacific Northwest through the lives of students enrolled in two girls’ schools established by the Sisters of Notre Dame de Namur (SNDN) in the Willamette Valley in the 1840s. These girls, predominantly métis daughters of fur-trade settlers and their Indian wives, along with their Irish and Anglo-American classmates, represent the socioeconomic and cultural transformation of the region as the mixing that gave rise to the unique intermediary culture referred to as “fur-trade society” succumbed to American political and social domination. The primary interest of this study is the process of acculturation facilitated by the Sisters of Notre Dame de Namur and the effect of this acculturation on the métis students. By using a sample of students drawn from the 1850 United States Federal Census of the Oregon Territory, documents relating to the fur trade, Catholic Missions, and early settlement, and standard genealogical and biographical sources, this study compares the two SNDN schools through an analysis of their academic and cultural purposes and ethnic lineage, socioeconomic class, and religious affiliation of other students. Furthermore, as a test of the success of their religious training and acculturation, this study examines the socioeconomic and ethnic characteristics of marriage partners and the students’ religious affiliation as adults, and looks for evidence of métis ethic identity. The resulting analysis uncovers a two-tier system of education that mirrored the bipartite social structure of fur trade: the SNDN tailored the educational offerings at the two schools to serve the different needs of their discrete populations of settlers. Subsequent to their schooling, servant class métis girls most often retained paternal religious and ethnic ties, while officer class daughters show less attachments to their Catholic religious roots and chose more ethnically diverse spouses. Finally, the exogamous martial patterns of both groups discount the presence of strong métis ethic identity.
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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 | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.004 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 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".