The Archaeology of an Image: The Persistent Persuasion of Thomas Moore Keesick’s Residential School Photographs
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 before and after photographs of Thomas Moore Keesick—known widely by his Anglicized name, Thomas Moore—are some of the most iconic and prolific images signifying Canada’s dark legacy of Indian Residential Schools. Taken in the 1890s and appearing in an 1896 Department of Indian Affairs Annual Report, the photos were originally meant to demonstrate Keesick’s successful assimilation through the Regina Indian Industrial School. Assuming an archaeological approach to photography, this article argues that the images of Keesick were not just brute expressions of a powerful colonizing influence (as they are now understood), but desperate attempts by insecure institutions seeking legitimacy as part of a broader colonial apparatus. In many contemporary uses, audiences take these images for granted as a sign of unfettered colonial power. Contemporary critiques that mobilize the photos to illustrate the power of colonization with little historical situating are reductive in their treatment of colonial institutions as homogenous. We attempt to nuance contemporary and historical uses of Keesick’s images to ask how photographic and interpretive practices forward strikingly similar understandings of the images across time, without considering the conventions under which they were originally constructed. Finally, we explore instances of radical resituating to illustrate how recontextualizations of the Keesick images can encourage new ways of seeing and interrogating them.
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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 | 0.000 | 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 | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 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