Resisting Consumption: Exploring Pathways of Resistance to the Assimilative Nature of the Canadian Education System through Tomson Highway's Kiss of the Fur Queen
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In this project paper, I explore the domination and subjugation of Indigenous people that the Canadian education system encourages. I use Tomson Highway's text Kiss of the Fur Queen to examine instances of isolation felt by the protagonists Jeremiah and Gabriel in both Residential School and high school. Isolation creates feelings of inferiority, leaving them with the desire to fit within the dominant group. I also address instances in which the dominant nature of education can be challenged, primarily through the decentralization of the institution as the sole proprietor and manufacturer of knowledge. Highway addresses this through his use of the "Son of Ayash" and Weetigo and Weesageechak stories as well as the novel's overarching theme of institutional consumption and assimilation. Though the novel is set in Manitoba roughly fifty years ago, I choose to focus on the British Columbia curriculum because of my connection to it as both a student and a future teacher. My argument suggests that not much has changed from the dated curriculum discussed in the novel to the present curriculum that I critique. Assimilation is still a significant portion of what is taught in schools; the practice is simply pursued more discretely. Finally, I address the difficulty in challenging a system that one is a part of. Through the decentralization of the institution as the hub of knowledge, one makes way for others and their methods for understanding the world.
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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 | 0.005 | 0.013 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.024 | 0.018 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.013 | 0.006 |
| Open science | 0.003 | 0.007 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.006 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.008 | 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".