To “Evaluate the Mental Powers of the Indian Children": Race and Intelligence Testing in Canada's Indian Residential School System
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Scholars have examined how theories of race-based intelligence as they relate to IQ testing have impacted Canadian society in the realms of educational policy, immigration, and public health, yet little research has focused on the role of IQ and other intelligence testing in the Indian residential school system. When administrators observed students’ poor grade progression, they sought not to reform a system that forced the children to work for at least half the day, but rather to blame students’ home environments and supposedly hereditary racial traits. This paper examines the social scientific context of intelligence testing in residential schools in the early to mid-1900s and argues that testing results—a biased and inaccurate measure of mental ability—played a role in justifying the schools’ emphasis on a limited academic curriculum. It argues that the data gathered on Indigenous mental deficiency came to form part of the “official information” guiding the Department of Indian Affairs’ administration of the residential school system. Ultimately, discourses of race-based mental inferiority impacted the type and quality of education provided to Indigenous children with reverberations down to the present day.
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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 | 0.003 | 0.008 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.004 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.025 | 0.013 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 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".