14: One Good Protest: Thomas King, Indian Policy, and American Indian Activism
Why this work is in the frame
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Bibliographic record
Abstract
T homas K ing published major works prior to and simultaneously with a shift in the primary focus of American Indian literary critical inquiry from issues of culture and identity to questions of history and politics. Much of the early scholarship on King's fiction, therefore, approaches it with an interest in identities and storytelling strategies and assesses its cultural, multicultural, and crosscultural character. The attention to American Indian intellectual, activist, and tribal nation specific histories by Osage scholar Robert Warrior (1995), Cherokee scholar Jace Weaver (1997), and Muscogee Creek and Cherokee scholar Craig Womack (1999) shapes more recent critical work, for example, by Daniel Justice (Cherokee), who elucidates the Cherokee histories of removal that inform a novel such as Truth & Bright Water . My essay continues to account for King's work within the context of this new critical emphasis by assessing the role of US and Canadian Indian policies and American Indian and First Nations activism in his fiction. King's anticolonial exasperation at the former maintains an uneasy tension with his antifundamentalist skepticism of the latter. This antifundamentalism informs both the strategy of disguising his own anticolonial outrage in allegory or filtering it through often obscure historical references and his depiction of American Indian activists as one-dimensional dogmatists. While US and Canadian Indian policies structure the fictional worlds of the novel Green Grass, Running Water and short stories such as “Joe the Painter and the Deer Island Massacre,” “A Short History of Indians in Canada,” and “Tidings of Comfort and Joy,” King does not make explicit the direct correlation between these policies and the contemporary lives of Indigenous and non-Indigenous people.
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Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| 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 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 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 it