From Controversy to Celebration: How the 1995 Relocation of Marcien Lemay's Riel from the Manitoba Legislature to Saint Boniface Impacted Its Public Reception
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In 1970, when the Manitoba government commissioned a statue of Louis Riel, one of Canada’s most significant (and most contentious) historical figures, the public expected a certain level of controversy. Commemorating an Indigenous francophone leader who was executed in 1885 for rebelling against the Canadian government was bound to elicit a certain level of resistance. Few, however, anticipated that the memorial would remain a topic of intense debate for the next 25 years. Yet, after 1995 when the statue was moved approximately 2.5 km from the Manitoba legislative grounds to the neighbourhood of Saint Boniface, the controversy all but disappeared. The question therefore arises: Why was the statue seen as objectionable in its first location, but as a successful commemorative project in its second? I argue that the statue’s relocation effectively changed how it was perceived by the public. This was achieved through a combination of changes to the statue’s environment, such as primary audience, physical surroundings and context markers, and an evolution of how Riel was remembered over time.
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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 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.047 | 0.020 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.013 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.007 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.010 | 0.001 |
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".