Politics as Metis Ethnogenesis in Red River: Instrumental Ethnogenesis in the 1830s and 1840s in Red River
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This paper analyzes how the Metis of Red River began to emphasize their rights as British subjects as well as aboriginal descendents in the 1840s.This paper argues that the fusion of these two identities, into a single Metis one, was an attempt to further the economic rights of traders.Specifically, it was a legal argument so that the Metis elites of Red River could circumvent the Hudson's Bay Company's monopoly on buffalo and other trophy furs.Gerhard Ens has theorized that Metis identity developed "instrumentally".The approach "sees ethnicity and the rise of nationalism as situational and strategic: a product of politics and the manipulation of resources by individuals and elites." 1 This paper will analyze how the Metis began to emphasize their rights as British subjects as well as aboriginal descendants in the era following the merger of the Hudson's Bay Company (HBC) with the Northwest Company (NWC).The purpose of this paper is to argue that the notion of Metis identity as a combination of aboriginal rights and the rights of white settlers was a legal and political position taken by the principal Metis residents of Red River.This position was taken to gain commercial freedom from the Hudson's Bay Company so that they and the other residents could have a commercial future hunting buffalo and trophy furs.This paper will analyze how the socio-economic environment of the north-west plains brought the residents of Red River into conflict with the Hudson's Bay Company.It will also analyze the reasons for the Hudson's Bay Company's strict interpretation of their charter to exclusive trade, and to analyze how that strict interpretation left the residents of Red River desperate.This paper will explain why the principal Metis settlers of Red River chose to portray themselves as dual citizens (British and Aboriginal) when they petitioned the Colonial Office to rescind the Company's charter in 1846, and how the timeline and structure of the legal argument was closely linked to the fortunes of the
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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 | 0.004 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.013 | 0.018 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.004 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| 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".