Returning to the Kaswéntah River: A Trans-Indigenous Reading of Land-Centred Citizenship in Thomas King’s Truth and Bright Water
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Using a trans-Indigenous methodology to read Thomas King’s novel Truth and Bright Water through the frame of the Hodinohso:ni Aterihwahnira:tshera ne Kaswentah (Two Row Wampum), this paper argues that difference and division – between peoples, races, and nations – can still support an inclusive citizenship based upon our shared interdependence with the Earth. Through the novel’s side-by-side positioning of Indigenous and Settler spaces, and characters’ struggles navigating across these spaces, I explore both the possibility of unification based upon shared ecology, and the current barriers to such a possibility wrought by colonialism’s disruption of Indigenous landed relationships. Juxtaposed next to the principles and protocols of the Two Row Wampum, the novel highlights colonialism’s disruption of Indigenous land-centrism as a consequence of Settler failure to follow the conduct of sharing and difference outlined by that agreement. As such, I look at the attempted annihilation of the buffalo, the enforcement of Christianity, the theft of Indigenous artifacts and remains, and profit motivated acts of ecocide as examples in the novel of Settler interference in landed citizenship. I then consider Monroe Swimmer as an Elder Brother figure who champions landed citizenship by engaging the people of Truth and Bright Water in land-centred ceremonies that combine both Indigenous and Settler cultures. Monroe demonstrates how knowing your relations and carrying the land in your centre enables movement back and forth across both material markers of difference, such as national and reservation borders, and cognitive ones, such as binaries of nativism or assimilation.
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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 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.011 | 0.023 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.006 | 0.005 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 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".