Missionaries, merchants, and Inuit entrepreneurs: An examination of trade relations along the Labrador coast
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The study of Inuit-European contact in Labrador has often divided the coast into north and south, creating a dichotomy that ignores Inuit mobility and emphasizes the arrival and placement of Europeans along the coast. This has caused some researchers to focus too heavily on missionary trade involvement in the north while ignoring merchant activity in the south, and vice versa. This paper seeks to provide further evidence in support of Inuit entrepreneurs as catalysts for the abundance and diversity of European-made trade goods along the coast, rather than the missionaries or merchants themselves. This study presents an analysis of four Inuit dwellings dating from the mid-18th through early 19th centuries, both pre- and post- missionary arrival, from two distinct regions: Nain and Hamilton Inlet. The results show no significant difference in the quantity of trade goods between the two regions, either before or after the arrival of Moravian missionaries. There may have been another factor at work: influential Inuit traders who were a key component of the trade network, who likely rose to entrepreneurial status prior to the arrival of missionaries, and who continued to move items along the coast thereafter. Thus, the increasing European presence did not largely affect the trade network that had emerged by the early 18th century, aside from providing the Inuit population with access to additional resources and more options.
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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 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.005 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 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".