Alternative (hi)stories in stolen generation and residential school narratives : reading indigenous life writings by Doris Pilkington and Shirley Sterling
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
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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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 | 0.003 | 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 | 0.003 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| 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 it