Living Ghosts and Mischievous Monsters: Chilling American Indian Stories by Dan SaSuWeh Jones
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Reviewed by: Living Ghosts and Mischievous Monsters: Chilling American Indian Stories by Dan SaSuWeh Jones Elizabeth Bush Jones, Dan SaSuWeh Living Ghosts and Mischievous Monsters: Chilling American Indian Stories; illus. by Weshoyot Alvitre. Scholastic, 2021 [176p] Trade ed. ISBN 9781338681628 $26.99 Paper ed. IBSN 9781338681604 $12.99 E-book ed. ISBN 9781338681635 $12.99 Reviewed from digital galleys R Gr. 4-8 This crowd-pleasing anthology of traditional and contemporary tales introduces readers to other-worldly presences from First Nations across the United States and Canada. Editor and contributor Jones, a member of the Ponca Tribe of Indians of Oklahoma, gathers the stories into five sections—Ghosts, Spirits, Witches, Monsters, the Supernatural—prefaced by notes on what makes each category distinct. Many readers will dive right into Ghosts expecting maximum shivers, but as Jones notes, “In my experience they have little to no physical effect on the living—unless someone hurts themselves when reacting to a ghost!” Indeed, the creeps build as the title proceeds, and cursed dolls, ice-hearted cannibal monsters, vampire rock art, flying orbs that presage death, possession by man-otter, and medicine-men turned evil leave ghostly apparitions looking pretty anemic. Particularly engrossing are the many contemporary attestations of personal encounters, delivered without macabre flourish but packing a dramatic wallop by tellers confident of the reality of their experiences. Alvitre, a member of the Tongva tribe of Southern California, [End Page 60] supplies an appropriately eerie line drawing for each tale; sources and suggestions for further reading are included, as is a note from Jones about how he collected and compiled the stories, along with the assurance, “Some tribal cultures are not allowed to share certain ghost stories because the spirits are so real to them that saying the spirit names may endanger the storytellers and their families — I respect that, and I did not include those stories.” Copyright © 2021 The Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois
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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 | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.012 | 0.004 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.009 | 0.005 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.005 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.027 | 0.005 |
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".