The Rock Painting/Xela:ls of the Tsleil-Waututh: A Historicized Coast Salish Practice
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract This article argues that the red-ocher paintings (pictographs) in Coast Salish Tsleil-Waututh territory in Indian Arm, British Columbia, were made around the time of contact in specific response to demographic collapse caused by smallpox. Tsleil-Waututh people selected fifteen distinctive geological features along the shoreline of Indian Arm for marking. It is suggested that these locations were highly significant places to past Tsleil-Waututh people because they were physical embodiments of oral traditions (sxwoxwyiam) and associated with underwater-dwelling supernatural creatures (stl’aleqem). Relying on local oral traditions, regional archaeology, and local ethnographies, the article argues that these specific locations had very ancient roots in Tsleil-Waututh history but were marked in the early contact period with red paint by Tsleil-Waututh ritualists (shxwla:m, “Indian Doctor”). They did this to connect with supernatural powers in these locations, to preserve oral histories associated with them, and thus to contribute to the demographic revitalization of the Tsleil-Waututh people. The article contends that Tsleil-Waututh rock painting is not an essentialized cultural practice but a historically contingent one—a reflection of specific events.
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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 | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.006 | 0.008 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.007 | 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".