Music, power, and relations: fiddling as a meeting place between re-settlers and indigenous nations in Manitoba
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This dissertation examines fiddling as a meeting place between Turtle Island's Indigenous nations and Manitoba's re-settler population. Based on archival research, interviews, and fieldwork in Manitoba, it argues that fiddling both reflects the broader relationship between Indigenous nations and re-settlers (which is marked by an unequal distribution of power) and is used to remake this relationship. The first section focuses on Indigenous fiddling. Using mainstream (re-settler) newspaper articles from the early twentieth century to the present day, it examines re-settler representations of Indigenous fiddlers and fiddling; it also explores Metisfest, a contemporary Metis rendezvous that functions as a space for Metis cultural resurgence, using fiddling as a central 'draw'. The next section considers the old-time scene by providing a working definition of the style, exploring fiddle contests, and addressing a number of key tensions in the old-time fiddle community. It argues that old-time fiddling functions as an unmarked centre that reinforces an unequal relationship between nations; at the same time, it acknowledges the significant contributions made by Indigenous fiddlers to Manitoba's old-time scene. The final section focuses on the Manitoba Open Old Time Fiddle Championships, a fiddle competition that explicitly brings old-time and Metis (style) fiddling together through the inclusion of a Metis-style category. This final section points to the tension between mainstream and Metis understandings of Metis fiddling and how Metis-style fiddling (at the competition) ultimately serves to affirm the dominance of an unmarked (i.e., old-time) style of fiddling. By exploring the Indigenous and old-time fiddle scenes from varied perspectives, this dissertation uncovers the complex relationships between central Turtle Island's two main fiddle styles. It also fills a significant lacuna in the research on Manitoba's fiddle scenes and recognizes that the burden to decolonize Turtle Island should not be placed (solely) on the shoulders of Indigenous nations.
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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 | 0.004 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| 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".