Natural Practices: The Creative Autonomy Encoded within First Nations Dye and Weaving Processes of the Chilkat Blanket
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This article describes two research residencies undertaken at the American Museum of Natural History (AMNH) during the months of August and October 2019, wherein Dr. Mark Joseph O’Connell looked specifically at weaving and dye techniques found in a form of ceremonial dancing blanket called the Chilkat. The examination of these artifacts provides valuable information on pre-colonial First Nations industry, the ongoing impacts of colonial processes, and also offers clues to a pre-colonial fashion history, one that re-contextualizes these exquisitely crafted garments and thereby re-situates them within previously held notions of political and social spheres of community life. This research provides a more nuanced and inclusive framework of Canadian fashion history, as well as information concerning pre-colonial First Nations industry and the ongoing impacts of colonial processes; It also to highlights the extraordinary techniques and iconography employed in their manufacture. Efforts toward cultural preservation through creative labor can also be examined through Chilkat artistry, as craft-based agency has served as a conduit for preserving cultural history as well as providing an ongoing means of ensuring First Nations autonomy and agency.
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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 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.012 | 0.048 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.008 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 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".