Bibliographic record
Abstract
Mara Feeney. Rankin Inlet. Fiddletown, CA: Gaby Press, 2009. 252 pp. $17.95 U.S. sc. Mara Feeney first experienced Canadian Arctic as an undergraduate anthropology student. Later she worked in Inuit communities around Hudson Bay, and eventually moved south. Almost forty years after her initial stay with an Inuit family, she published a novel set in Rankin Inlet that details building of a new life and family. That story is intertwined with transformation of a culture and birth of a new Canadian territory: Our Land, or Nunavut, in Inuktitut. Feeney's focus is Alison, a young nurse-midwife from Liverpool, England, who moves to Canadian Arctic after graduation. Shortly thereafter, she marries an Inuk hunter in Rankin Inlet, and there they remain to raise their family. Alison's story unfolds through dated diary entries, letters, and e-mail, written by her and a multi-generational cast of characters, comprised primarily of her extended family. It is enriched by internal narrative of Alison's father-in-law, Nikmak, whose style remains true to his oral tradition. Feeney uses Inuktitut expressions throughout novel, and she provides a pronunciation guide as well as a glossary. The novel is organized into sections called Keewatin, Transitions, and Kivalliq. Until 1999, Keewatin, meaning wind in Cree, was a district of Northwest Territories encompassing mainland north of Manitoba, as well as islands of Hudson, James, and Ungava Bays. Its population was largely Inuit, but its legal name was drawn from language of a sometime enemy. Keewatin opens on March 15, 1970 with a diary entry made by a young, English nurse-midwife. She has severed her ties to her working-class family and their Roman Catholic faith, but retains a link to her youngest sister. Set to depart from Liverpool, Alison writes that her diary may be the record of a Grand Adventure, as many Brits and Scots have had before me--the ones with dim futures at home who signed on as traders or missionaries to explore arctic (3). The section ends just eight months later, but by then we are grounded in characters' personal histories, as well as sociocultural fabric of their lives. Feeney orchestrates her characters' voices by varying number of their entries. In Keewatin, Alison's commentaries exceed all others. She is alienated by behaviour of some outsiders working in or visiting Rankin Inlet, and she is baffled by incongruity manifest as traditional Inuit selectively adopt outsiders' ways. A longing for meaningful connection and a lively curiosity propel Alison towards the other. She encounters Ivaluk, and their attraction is mutual. Ivaluk's letters to his adopted brother, Thomasie, who is at school in south, detail pleasures and pains of settlement life, focussing more on public than on domestic domains. Though he writes in English, Ivaluk signs his name with Inuit syllabics. Alison's and Ivaluk's passages telegraph their growth individually and as a couple, but Nikmak's contemplation is more complex. The eleven stories he tells his daughter, as she lies dying in nursing station, not only show his humanity, but they also conjure up Inuit past. …
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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 | 0.001 | 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 | 0.006 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.002 |
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".