Cultural Genocide and the First Nations of Upper Canada: Some Romantic-era Roots of Canada’s Residential School System
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This article investigates the Romantic-era origins of Canada’s residential school system, which removed Aboriginal children from their homes in an official effort to sever familial and cultural ties and indoctrinate them into the hegemonic Euro-Canadian cultural order. The subject of a ground-breaking report recently published by the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada, this education system was not formally instituted until 1879; hence, most of its scholarship focuses on Canada’s post-Confederation period. This article attempts to expand our understanding of the residential school system by tracing its formal ideological foundations back to the 1820s when Upper Canada’s lieutenant governor, Sir Peregrine Maitland, and his chief adviser, the prominent Anglican cleric, educator, and amateur poet John Strachan – both of whom maintained strong transatlantic ties – first recommended Aboriginal children’s participation in immersive forms of colonial pedagogy. To contextualize this discussion, the article also examines key writings by the Irish-Ojibwe poet Bemwewegiizhigokwe (Jane Johnston Schoolcraft), who in 1839 lamented her children’s enrollment in American boarding schools, becoming one of the first Aboriginal writers to reveal the adverse effects of such pedagogy on Native American children and their families.
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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 | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.008 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.011 | 0.018 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.007 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| 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".