Extracting Inuit: The of the North Controversy and the White Possessive
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This article critically explores the heated controversy surrounding screenings of Québécois filmmaker Dominic Gagnon's found-footage documentary of the North 2015, into which he inserted “found” clips of northern Inuit life he had extracted from YouTube as aesthetic capital for southern cinephile jouissance. In conversation with Aileen Moreton-Robinson's theorization of the white possessive, I propose that the vocabulary employed by many of the settler cultural institutions and critics defending the film—e.g., the democratic imperative to protect artistic freedom and allow reasoned dialogue about “difficult” texts to flourish in public spaces—is inextricable from the type of entitlements sustaining settler colonial claims to indigenous lands, and to indigeneity itself, as part of a free and boundless Lockean common. I argue that such default recourse to the democratic imperative of restorative dialogue actually fails to do what it pretends it is meant to do: via mutual understanding and recognition, to solve or resolve the systemic colonial inequalities that Inuit opponents of the film wish to make visible. This common recourse to the “bestowing” of a deliberative public space in the name of a necessary intercultural dialogue reflects the very structure of feeling of liberal colonial settlement and thus reveals a certain cinephilia's subjective and material investment in the white possessive.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
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 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.010 | 0.003 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| 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 itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, 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".