Colonial Encounters at the Turn of the Twentieth Century: “Unsettling” the Personal Photograph Albums of Andrew Onderdonk and Benjamin Leeson
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Photography has been used by settlers to document and fictionalize colonial encounters in Canada since the mid-nineteenth century as an attempt to displace Indigenous peoples from the land, to contain them within settler albums. In this essay, the author looks at visual practices of settler photograph albums in British Columbia from the turn of the twentieth century to argue that this is a key site of settler forgetting and erasure of colonial violence. Specifically, the author analyzes the visual practices of depicting the before and after of colonial encounters in the personal photograph albums of contractor Andrew Onderdonk (c885) and photographer and civil servant Benjamin Leeson (1887-1900). Paulette Regan’s methodology of “unsettling” (2010) guides a destabilization of the historical narratives that are supported by these personal photographic albums, and asks how they produce settler denial and guilt about Indigenous-settler relations, as well as what we can learn about colonial injustice and violence through an unsettling encounter with these same images.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 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 teacher head, 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".