Hand crafted : creating a market for Canada's Northwest Coast native arts and crafts
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Museum collections contain examples of Aboriginal Northwest Coast material culture that have been categorised as curios, artefacts, tourist art, arts and crafts, or art. This dissertation examines the emergence of Native Northwest Coast Aboriginal objects made for sale as "arts and crafts". The discussion draws on the multidisciplinary field of material culture studies, on the theories of commodification and on the concept of the reinvention of culture. At the end of the nineteenth century the British Arts and Crafts Movement called for a return to the values and practices of an earlier period of hand crafted objects. For the next half-century in North America government agents, missionaries and philanthropic societies encouraged the production of traditional Aboriginal functional objects as a form of arts and crafts. This activity was perceived as a means of economic self-sufficiency, and to promote feelings of self-identity and self-worth among Native producers. At the onset of World War II. various individuals, private organisations, and government departments worked to transform the producer and the marketplace through education and public policy. Change was to be accomplished by establishing new venues, new expectations of behaviour, and a new social relationship between the supplier and the consumer. Today, a growing number of Native studio crafts people create objects of traditional material culture as a means of livelihood, and as participants in the revitalisation of Northwest Coast Aboriginal society. The term arts and crafts, however, has fallen into disuse and disfavour among Western scholars and Indigenous producers who associate the phrase with poor quality and low income. The term of choice today is art and artist. This work suggests that the production of arts and crafts in British Columbia was an important transition stage in the development of the Native art market. The efforts by private individuals, philanthropic societies and government programs during the mid-20th century raised the value of the hand crafted object. The thesis also suggests that the concept inherent in the Arts and Crafts Movement of "doing good when doing craft", is cyclical, reappearing as strategic policy during times of economic and social crisis on the Northwest Coast.
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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 | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.014 | 0.003 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.008 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.026 | 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".