‘The faithful children of the Great Mother are starving’: Queen Victoria in contact zone dialogues in western Canada
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Through a focus on the Saulteaux of the St. Peter’s settlement in western Canada, this chapter explores the mobilization of Queen Victoria by both the colonized and the colonizers in a series of “contact zones” over the nineteenth century. The Saulteaux confronted fur traders, missionaries, soldiers, settlers, and government officials, and in these encounters they produced, developed and honed a tradition of oratory that incorporated references to Victoria. They called on the monarch’s representatives to act with honour, justice, and integrity, and to defend them against settler pressure and oppression. Declarations of fealty to the Queen were accompanied by sharp criticism of the failure of her representatives to provide the just and humane treatment promised. In dialogues with Indigenous people, settler authorities represented Victoria as a benevolent maternal monarch, particularly at treaty negotiations where the equality and kinship ties of the parties was emphasized. Settlers also deployed the image of a compassionate Queen and her loyal Indigenous subjects as this was at the heart of the myth of Canada’s reputation as humane and benign colonizers.
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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 | 0.006 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.081 | 0.028 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.017 | 0.005 |
| Open science | 0.003 | 0.009 |
| Research integrity | 0.007 | 0.011 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.012 | 0.001 |
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".