A Whisper Past: Childless after Eugenic Sterilization in Alberta, a memoir by Leilani Muir. (2014) by Leilani Muir
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Leilani Muir's memoir is the candid story of a brave and remarkable woman who triumphed "against all odds."Her name has become familiar to Canadians over the past decade, since she captured sympathetic attention as the first-and to date, the only-person to successfully sue the Alberta Government for wrongful sterilization.In 1996 the presiding judge on her case ruled in her favour, going so far as to describe the Government's actions as offensive.The trial had relied, in part, on Muir's diary, which she wrote in trying to make sense of her past.In this diary, she recorded information about her life from childhood to the time of the trial.That diary served as an early draft of her memoir.The success of the trial and the recognition that Muir received since that time, through speaking tours, a political campaign, and gratitude from within the local community in Alberta, encouraged her to continue to transform her diary into a memoir.With the help of friends, and editorial guidance from Doug Wahlsten, the book was published bringing her story "up to date."Muir's story has been documented in many forms of media: she has been a) the focus of a documentary by Glynis Whiting distributed by the National Film Board of Canada, b) interviewed by the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation and other Canadian media, c) the focal point of academic projects, d) the center of theatrical productions, and e) the center of legal records.Although those interpretations reinforce a level of shock at the vicious encounters she had throughout her life, this book differs from those other accounts since it is her life in her own words.Muir portrayed convincingly a past that gives her every right to be outraged, even bitter, but hers is a story of faith and forgiveness.Muir was born on July 5, 1944 in Calgary, Alberta.The truth about her family is unclear; she lived on several farms with people she believed to be her mother, father (or stepfather), as well as boys that were her brothers and/or cousins.She was the middle child, and the only girl in the family.Muir's account of her early life explains that her mother did not want her, showing this by the abuse she caused her.The gritty details of her life are often troubling, as Muir tells her readers about the starvation, beatings, humiliation, fear, and berating that took place daily.She slept in the farm granary, stole meals from the pig troughs, and was made to kneel in forgiveness on grains of wheat, which cut into her bony knees.She was rarely allowed to go to school and seldom was seen by doctors.Her mother treated her with contempt.By age 10 or 11 Muir's mother succeeded in having her placed in a home for what at the time
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
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 | 0.003 | 0.007 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.030 | 0.015 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.006 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.003 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.005 | 0.012 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 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".