This Benevolent Experiment: Indigenous Boarding Schools, Genocide, and Redress in Canada and the United States
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Andrew Woolford examines in detail the history of four indigenous boarding schools, two in New Mexico and two in Manitoba, drawing upon official reports, available interviews with former students, and other sources. The study illuminates significant differences between American and Canadian policies and the implications for students and staff. The Canadian schools were entrusted to poorly funded denominational agencies with little guidance by government, while in the United States the schools were government institutions, but federal policy toward educating indigenous youth changed repeatedly. This Benevolent Experiment is a contribution to the field of genocide studies rather than to the history of education or indigenous history. Before Woolford turns to discussing the schools he provides nearly one hundred pages on “Settler Colonial Genocide in North America” and “Framing the Indian as a Problem.” The discussion of the four schools is consequently highly selective, seeking to prove the “genocidal” intentions of those who created the system of residential schools. If there were warm relations between staff and students, this is evidence of “the symbolic violence of kindness” (p.197). When a former student has good things to say about her school, we are reminded that “her sincerity should not lead us to ignore the symbolic violence at work in the schools” (p. 196). When indigenous arts and cultures are celebrated by Woolford's sources, “this communicated the sense that cultural practices were appreciated for being quaint … rather than culturally integral” (p. 193). If sloppy administrative practices at a school were replaced by careful records, students were “transformed into a biopolitical subject” (p. 178).
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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 | 0.003 | 0.007 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.059 | 0.018 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.007 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.006 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.005 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 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".