Reconciliation and the Representation of Indigenous Peoples in Introductory Sociology Textbooks
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The Truth and Reconciliation Commission has indicated that education has a central role to play in the reconciliation process. This article assesses how well sociology is doing in this regard by looking at what introductory textbooks say about three topics: (1) residential schools, (2) Indigenous "religion;" and (3) the social construction of Indigenous identities. The findings are mixed. While most textbooks mention the "loss of culture" and the abuse associated with those schools, discussions of intergenerational trauma could be much improved. Discussions of Indigenous religion are still guided by a Western model that has long been regarded as inappropriate to Indigenous cultures. All textbooks ignore the ways in which Indigenous identities are socially constructed and how this is linked to the dramatic growth of the Indigenous population over the last several decades. A concluding section draws upon the work of Indigenous scholars in suggesting ways of decolonizing textbooks.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
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 | 0.026 | 0.042 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.004 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.015 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 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 itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, 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".