"Not of the Nation": Canadian History Textbooks and the Impossibility of an African-Canadian Identity
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The historical experience of blacks in Canada has continued to be one of partial remembrance and recognition set against a highly developed and dominant Anglo portrayal of Canadian history. This partiality has greatly limited the development of identity for Canadian blacks due to general non-recognition of them on the part of the white Canadian majority. Historiographically, the historical presence of blacks in Canada has been constructed as distinctly provisional. This study will illustrate the historical exclusion of black Canadians from the Canadian historical narrative by examining pre-Confederation Canadian black history as it appeared in thirty-two intermediate level (grades 7-10) textbooks authorized for use in Ontario between 1950 and 1985. These textbooks were evaluated based on their coverage of slavery in Canada, the Loyalist migration, the War of 1812, the Rebellions of 1837, and the Underground Railroad. These events are helpful in this assessment because they exist at the intersection of noteworthy events in Canadian history and significant moments in the history of black migration and black contribution to the nation. By uncovering these omissions, this study will also discuss the extent to which "black Canadian-ness" was constructed within these texts as a contradiction in terms. Informed by anti-racist pedagogy concerning the hegemonic effects of curricula on racial identity formation, it will focus on where such exclusions affected the process of identity formation of Canadian blacks and how it contributed to the alienation of black children's sense of belonging to the Canadian nation, curtailing the development of an identifiably black and Canadian identity for indigenous black.
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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 | 0.003 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| 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 itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; both teacher heads agree on what is shown here.
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".