“The Advent of Civilization Amongst Them Will Not Tend to Their Betterment”: Understanding Representations of Colonial Contact in the Kitikmeot
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Between 1915 and 1920, members of the Royal Northwest Mounted Police (RNWMP) wrote four major narratives of making contact with Inuit living in territory now known as the Kitikmeot region of Nunavut. The authors were the first representatives of the Canadian state to enter the region, and their narratives positioned Inuit as “better off without civilization.” Various members of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) stationed in the region over the subsequent three decades reproduced such discourse. While, at first glance, this discourse seems to attribute a nobility to traditional ways of life, upon closer inspection it actually positions Inuit as incapable of adapting successfully to changing socio-economic circumstances. Methodologically, this article critically reinterprets archival documents from the early agents of colonization in the Kitikmeot. While advancing historical scholarship concerning relations between Inuit and the Canadian state, the article contributes to contemporary agendas of decolonization and reconciliation by enabling a more complete understanding of the origins and nature of colonial rule in the Arctic. By arguing that colonial discourses have roots in local and specific relations of production, the article also contributes to postcolonial theories of efforts to legitimize colonization and represent colonized Others in essentialist and paternalistic terms.
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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 | 0.004 | 0.008 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.040 | 0.066 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.011 | 0.006 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.008 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.005 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 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".