Off to School: Filmic False Equivalence and Indian Residential School Scholarship
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This article uses two short, mid-twentieth century documentaries produced by the National Film Board of Canada as an entry point into charting popular and scholarly representations of Indian residential schools. The article begins with a close reading of one 1958 film followed by an overview of how scholarship has changed over the last fifty years, particularly alongside and sometimes because of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada. The article advocates centring survivor testimony and provides major turns in considering as well as teaching about residential schooling and settler colonialism in Canada as well as ways of how to teach about and learn from it. The article concludes with a close reading of a second film, produced in 1971 by Abenaki filmmaker Alanis Obomsawin, which offers a decidedly different perspective from the film discussed at the beginning of the article.RésuméCet article utilise deux courts documentaires produits par l’Office national du film à l’époque du centenaire de la Confédération comme point de départ permettant d’étudier les représentations populaires et universitaires des pensionnats indiens. L’article s’amorce sur une lecture attentive d’un film de 1958, puis propose un aperçu des changements survenus dans la littérature académique au cours des cinquante dernières années, en particulier grâce à la Commission de vérité et réconciliation du Canada. Il met l’accent sur le témoignage des survivants et propose des changements importants, à la fois dans la façon de comprendre le système des pensionnats et le colonialisme canadien, de même que sur les façons de l’enseigner et les leçons à en tirer. L’article se termine par l’analyse d’un second film produit en 1971par la cinéaste Abénaquis Alanis Obomsawin, qui offre une perspective très différente de celui tourné en 1958.
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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 | 0.002 | 0.008 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.004 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.025 | 0.037 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.016 | 0.005 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.009 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.007 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.006 | 0.001 |
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".