“Were It Not for the Spirit of the Boys… There Would Have Been No Story”: Memory and Childhood in Residential School Narratives
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This article examines how the policies and practices of the residential school system refracted the conceptual dynamics of childhood in twentieth-century Canada and shaped the lives of Indigenous children in that system. In particular, I discuss how the racializing logic of the residential system totalized or disrupted broader conceptual shifts in the relationship of childhood to the public domain and to adulthood. In this context, I draw on three residential school narratives to argue that memory played an essential role in the lives of the Indigenous students as a crucial site of creative agency, and in the residential school system’s strategy of assimilation. These narratives make a certain twentieth-century Indigenous child knowable to history, one that relies on a set of relationships, held together by memory, among the child, the adult, and the familial and communal narratives in which they are situated.
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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 | 0.006 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.018 | 0.040 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.007 | 0.007 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.006 |
| 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".