Confronting Colonisation: Contemporary Canadian and Australian Picture Books About Indigenous Peoples
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This paper will examine how Canadian and Australian picture books about Indigenous peoples have evolved over the past three decades into texts that imagine the survival of Indigenous languages and land despite colonisation. Drawing on a sample of six contemporary picture books about Indigenous peoples in present-day Canada and Australia, I will explore how these works challenge representations of Indigenous peoples as the Other through complimentary textual and visual techniques that instead Other colonists (Nodelman 29). By positioning European colonisers as foreign invaders who fail in their attempts to erase rather than understand vibrant Indigenous cultures, these texts enable Indigenous communities to symbolically reclaim the land, family, language, and identity taken by colonial forces. Contemporary Canadian and Australian picture books about the European colonisation of Indigenous peoples assert the value of Indigeneity by mobilising a juxtaposition of Indigenous versus non-Indigenous through contrasting shapes and colours that enhance textual differences between colonised and coloniser. While Canadian texts highlight the healing capabilities of Indigenous languages, Australian texts emphasise how symbiotic relationships with the land empower Indigenous peoples, reflecting geographical variations between Indigenous histories in each country that ultimately encourage diverse representations of Indigeneity.
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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 | 0.007 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.005 | 0.009 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.027 | 0.010 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.008 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.010 | 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".