Bibliographic record
Abstract
Director Chloe Zhao's Songs My Brother Taught Me debuted at the Sundance Film Festival on January 27, 2015 before being widely released on March 2, 2016. The film addresses aspects of contemporary Lakota life on the Pine Ridge reservation in South Dakota, focusing particularly on the many difficulties residents face with poverty, lack of employment opportunities, and drug and alcohol addiction. However, unlike so many other films and documentaries depicting poverty in Native American communities, its portrayal here is handled responsibly and avoids the ham-fisted, sensationalistic approach characteristic of many other attempts.Aside from Zhao's abilities, a major reason for this is due to the outstanding performances of the cast, almost all of which are Native American, five of whom (John Reddy, Alan Reddy, Jashaun St. John, Travis Lone Hill, and Jorge Dullknife) reside on Ping Ridge or are of Lakota heritage. The other major characters are played by Irene Bedard (Inuit, Cree) and Taysha Fuller (Mohawk, Cayuga). The production team is to be commended for using Native talent in general and especially for utilizing local Lakota residents, who lend authenticity to the film's themes.The story focuses on Johnny Winters (John Reddy) and his sister Jashaun Winters (Jashaun St. John) coming to terms with their father, who they hardly knew, recently dying in a fire during an alcoholic stupor. Both live at home with their depressed mother (Irene Bedard) who seems to sleepwalk her way through the days, feeling remorse for the decisions she has made in her life. Her oldest son is in prison and she is searching for a way to make amends to her children for being so emotionally absent for much of their lives. Johnny works for Bill Britt (Alan Reddy) selling bootlegged liquor to community members in the hopes of earning enough money to move to Los Angeles with his girlfriend Aurelia (Taysha Fuller). Johnny is quite close with his younger sister Jashaun, so when she overhears hears his and Aurelia's plans to move away, she looks for a surrogate older brother and finds one in Travis Lone Hill, a tattoo artist and clothing designer.Johnny's determination to move to Los Angeles and willingness to sell alcohol to a community where alcohol is illegal, along with Jashaun's angst over her brother's plan to leave, remain the overarching focus of the film. However, the movie is not narrative-driven and much of the movie's strengths are in the several exchanges between characters, engaging with everyday occurrences in the community. For example, after Johnny's father's funeral, he and Jashaun meet several of their half-siblings who talk about their late father, his shortcomings, and the schism between community members on how best to handle alcohol on the reservation. …
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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 | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| 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".