‘Frog’s umbrella’ and ‘ghost’s face powder’: the cultural roles of mushrooms and other fungi for Canadian Indigenous Peoples
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This paper describes the importance of fungi to Canadian Indigenous Peoples. Based on collaborative research with Indigenous knowledge holders and a review of literature, approximately 30–40 fungi are documented as having cultural roles for Canadian Indigenous groups. Some peoples have not eaten mushrooms traditionally, whereas others have a history of harvesting, cooking, storing, and trading mushrooms for their diets. Perennial tree fungi have application as tinder, fire starter, and for carving masks. They also have a range of medicinal uses, some being consumed as medicinal teas, and others applied externally, in some cases by moxibustion to relieve underlying pain. Puffballs also have a range of material and medicinal applications, especially for stopping haemorrhages. Fungi are widely known for spiritual or sacred associations and play key roles in rituals, ceremonies, stories, and beliefs, which are also reflected in the names of some species. The antiquity of peoples’ relationships with fungi is likely very deep, extending back to ancient Asian or European ancestors of Pleistocene times, whose descendants on those continents have used them in similar ways. Fungi continue to play important roles for Indigenous Peoples today, with some being harvested commercially, and many still used in traditional ways.
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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 | 0.000 |
| 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".