From collection to community to collections again: Urban Indigenous women, material culture and belonging
Bibliographic record
Abstract
First Story Toronto – a community organization dedicated to the Indigenous histories of Toronto, Canada – is steward to a collection of items mostly made and collected during the 20th century. With origins in the Anglican Church Women, the collection reflects a time when policies and actions of the state and churches internalized colonial processes within Canada. Yet the donation of the ACW material to a Native woman and housing advocate in 1976 hints at the shifting political and cultural contexts of this collection. Native crafts were used by Indigenous women in the city in displays of both Indigenous sovereignty and multiculturalism. Recently, the collection has been taken up by another group of Indigenous women in the Memory, Meaning-Making and Collections project. Handling sessions with artefacts and ‘talking circles’, initially designed to research the role of objects in collective memory and life-history processes, have been appropriated by the participating seniors toward their own goals. The collection has become a source of continuing education, sparking the women to teach and learn beadwork and quillwork; compare life experiences among urban Indigenous people; question history-making processes; and visit museum stores to handle collections and learn with curators. The histories intersecting with this collection thus push back against a range of tropes, provide more nuanced insights into the lives and values of urban Indigenous women in Canada, and the ways collections are used in articulations of belonging among Indigenous 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 | 0.003 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.048 | 0.044 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.011 | 0.005 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.010 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.005 | 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".