Bibliographic record
Abstract
Joseph Boyden. Through Black Spruce. Toronto: Viking Canada, 2008. 360 pp. $34.00 hc. Through Black Spruce, Joseph Boyden's intense second novel, won Canada's prestigious Giller Prize in 2008, and deservedly so. Boyden, originally from Northern Ontario, now divides his time between there and Louisiana, where he teaches in MFA program at University of New Orleans. Through Black Spruce centres on Cree community around Moosonee, examining effects of historical and present-day colonial violence that is enacted both by institutions and individuals. Structurally, novel alternates between narratives of two protagonists: Will Bird, an aging ex-bush pilot who is in an unexplained, trauma-induced coma at novel's opening; and his adult niece, Annie, who experiences both seizures and visions, and who is troubled by disappearance of her sister, Suzanne. The narratives unfold in flashbacks, as unconscious Will tells his story to his nieces, while Annie, believing that hearing her voice will help her uncle to recover, brings him up to date on her search for Suzanne. Their narratives are linked through violent and terrifying presence of motorcycle gangs, whose drug-dealing influence reaches even--or perhaps especially-- into remote communities. Together, narratives combine to provide a composite portrait of how particular events can have far-reaching and unpredictable effects; reader is in unique position of understanding how actions in one person's story can affect those in other's. While a few of Boyden's critiques are too heavy-handed--Annie's status in New York modeling community could be explained far more subtly than through repetition of her Indian Princess nickname--the world that he creates is persuasive in its depiction of relation between past and present, and what it can mean to be Aboriginal in an increasingly globalized world. Colonization is still ongoing; it just wears new disguises. The economic exploitation originally practiced by Hudson's Bay Company, and still evident in low price offered when Annie goes to sell her furs at Northern Store (174-75), is here supplemented by underground drug economy of motorcycle gangs. When one enforcer refers to gang as the Corporation (336), economic connections are clear. As traditional cultural practices diminish, new dependencies grow, whether on drugs or on new Anishnabe soul food (36): KFC. These new structures take a place alongside more obviously oppressive institutions, like residential school that, Will sadly remarks, shattered his relationship with his father (80-82). …
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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 | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.003 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.003 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.352 | 0.157 |
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".