Alternative (hi)stories in stolen generation and residential school narratives : reading indigenous life writings by Doris Pilkington and Shirley Sterling
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The article analyzes two life writing narratives by Indigenous women writers from Australia and Canada in order to demonstrate the ways in which they present alternative (hi)stories of removed Indigenous children. Doris Pilkington’s Follow the Rabbit-Proof Fence (1996) and Shirley Sterling’s My Name is Seepeetza (1992) formulate an effective counter-discourse which undermines the power of the Australian and Canadian authorities to exercise absolute control over the lives of Indigenous children and their families. In her account, Pilkington celebrates active resistance in the form of a seemingly impossible escape from the River Moore Native Settlement, and records the symbolic journey home. Her alternative (hi)story consists in interweaving the pre-contact/early-contact history of Indigenous people in Western Australia and the nationally accepted history of European settlement in Australia, as well as in appropriating official archival materials and creating a counter-archive of traditional Aboriginal knowledge. Similarly, Sterling’s narrator asserts her cultural identity through a series of juxtaposed contrasts between the abusive residential school regime and the harmonious, functional family environment at home, contrasts that bring to the foreground the memories of times spent with the extended family, the daily activities ensuring the survival of the community, and generally the happy moments outside the range of state intervention.
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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 | 0.007 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.016 | 0.028 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.010 | 0.007 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.007 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.005 |
| 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".