A Spindle, an Awl, and the Construction Tools of Tla’amin Histories in the Twentieth Century
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Western historical and ethnographic scholarship has tended to overlook Indigenous people’s processes of making handmade items in favor of focusing on the finished objects. This neglect obscures the social, political, labor, and gender histories of the items. For members of the Tla’amin Nation in British Columbia, Canada, histories of tools show how processes of making objects have also been processes of making histories. Histories of making objects help to show how community members retained and actively defended their agency: tools enabled community members to make their presence visible in a larger colonial climate that sought to erase them. This article responds to calls from Indigenous scholars to analyze power and gender dynamics that are inherent within histories of objects themselves, as well as within community members’ own experiences. Oral histories and a traditional use study (TUS) conducted in Sliammon in the late 1990s historicize the significance of tools that contemporary community members have discussed. These phenomena of economic change, politics, and tradition have all been inherent themes in histories of making things in Sliammon. Such inherent themes become explicit with a focus on tools as construction tools of histories, and they show how tools have been central in Tla’amin responses to colonial incursions past and present.
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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 | 0.000 | 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 | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| 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".