Between vulnerability and resistance: Rhetorical strategies in Indigenous Canadian nonfiction
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This article explores two Henry Kreisel lectures by Indigenous authors, Eden Robinson’s The Sasquatch At Home: Traditional Protocols & Modern Storytelling (2010, published 2011) and Tomson Highway’s A Tale of Monstrous Extravagance: Imagining Multilingualism (2014, published 2015), to demonstrate how Indigenous nonfiction employs complex rhetorical strategies in order to engage cross-cultural readers and address crucial issues related to contemporary Indigeneity. Both narratives are claimed to convey a fragile balance between cultural loss and cultural survival — a negotiation which is related theoretically to Judith Butler’s notions of vulnerability, precarity, and resistance, particularly to her premise that vulnerability and resistance do not have to be opposed and/or mutually exclusive but rather work in intricate relationships. The article shows that while Robinson (Haisla/Heiltsuk) combines family stories with ethnography to bear witness to both the precarity and resilience of Haisla cultural and ecological survival, Highway (Cree) presents a multimodal and multilingual performance to unsettle his audience through combining humor and confrontation. I ultimately argue that, if Indigenous writing has always expressed this duality of exposing vulnerability as well as inscribing resistance, then, it may serve as a model for transcending the binary structure powerful/powerless, a move that Butler sees as fundamental to her redefinition of vulnerability. In other words, through this optic the history of Indigenous writing is indeed a history of exploring the ways in which vulnerability and resistance relate and interweave, rather than stand in opposition.
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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 | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| 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 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".