Art, Indigenous Sovereignty, and Resistance in the Age of Big Oil: Corwin Clairmont’s Two-Headed Arrow/The Tar Sands Project
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This article analyzes an art installation performed and exhibited in 2018 by the Séliš u Ksanka/Salish and Kootenai artist Corwin Clairmont: Two-Headed Arrow/The Tar Sands Project. Clairmont is a printmaker and creator of inventive and playful installations that follow conceptualist principles, which designate ideas and action as inherently aesthetic, but he is also and primarily a traditionally oriented Séliš u Ksanka artist. Concerned with petromodernity in the North American Rocky Mountain West and Great Plains, Clairmont’s installation charts the material and ideological routes of the oil flow between the Flathead Indian Reservation (and Missoula, Montana) and the Fort McMurray tar sands site located adjacent to Abathasca Chipewyan and Mikisew Cree First Nations land in Alberta. The history of energy extraction in Indian Country is largely occluded in the newly emergent interdisciplinary field of “energy humanities” and similarly rendered opaque in most official and unofficial discourses of the “West.” Clairmont’s installation responds to this social silence around indigeneity and petroleum production in this “sacrifice zone” via a collage of artworks that includes, among other things, gummy bears (a key oil commodity), lava lamps, prints, and photographs. The installation creates new historical and affective insights in the unsettling juxtapositions of its materials. Plastic functions in place of hides in Clairmont’s new “winter counts” and the focus on gummy bears allows for the unveiling of the longstanding kinship between the animals and Indigenous people. The installation participates in a powerful and historically long-standing tradition of Indigenous resistance, by challenging state forms of extractive settler colonialism.
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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 | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.030 | 0.029 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.010 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.007 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.006 | 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 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".