‘Frères et Enfants du même Père’: French-Indigenous alliance and diplomacy in the Petit Nord and Northern Great Plains, 1731-1743
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The eighteenth century French explorer La Vérendrye has been commemorated in Canadian history as the “Pathfinder of the West.” Although many historians have praised La Vérendrye for his tolerance and understanding of Aboriginal culture, he was nevertheless a colonial servant, fiercely loyal to the French Crown, and tasked to carry out the imperial policies of Versailles. La Vérendrye sought to create alliances with the Indigenous peoples of the Petit Nord – Cree, Monsoni, Assiniboine, and Dakota – with the intent to bring them into a network of French-mediated alliances emanating from the Great Lakes region. The governor of New France, called Onontio by the natives, sought to ensure the symbolic subjugation of all the Indigenous nations of the Great Lakes region and the Petit Nord. In theory, the role and acknowledgement of Onontio as the Father of the Alliance would have permitted the Cree, Assiniboine, and Dakota of the Petit Nord to recognize each other as “brothers and children of the same father [frères et Enfants du même Père],” to forget their inter-village quarrels, and to forge a common identity. In reality, this was far from the case, as frequent inter-village rivalries placed French officers at the western posts in a difficult position. Unlike their Great Lakes counterparts, the Cree of the Petit Nord did not need the “glue” of French mediation to hold together their already cohesive alliance with the Assiniboine, nor did they need Onontio’s authority to protect them from their traditional enemies, the Dakota. Ultimately, the Cree, Assiniboine, and Dakota rejected Onontio as their Father, dismissed La Vérendrye as his representative, and ultimately refused French conceptions of the alliance in the Petit Nord and Northern Great Plains.
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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 | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.009 | 0.005 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.003 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 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".