(Re-)Shaping Italian-Canadian and Indigenous Connections through Naming Practices
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Long before the formation of the first Italian communities in Canada, notable Italian navigators played a key role in the so-called “discovery of the Americas.” Suffice it to think of names like Cristoforo Colombo and Giovanni Caboto, who sailed to North America in 1492 and 1497 as part of European exploration journeys to the “new world.” The history of colonization in Canada and North America in general is therefore inextricably linked to these names, although Italian responsibilities in the occupation of Canada are not always acknowledged as such. On the contrary, celebratory traces of this history are still visible in the names of streets, squares, lakes, rivers, mountains, etc., as well as in public holidays and commemorative monuments. The present article aims at addressing the power of names in the creation of cultural memory. More specifically, the article explores the role that place-names and other commemorative practices linked to the Italian presence in Canada play in the commemoration of the colonial past and in the production of a narrative that celebrates the Italian contribution to its colonial occupation. Naming places, people, or holidays is not just a matter of choosing one name over another, but it reveals ideological stances and narratives. Similarly, the presence of celebratory monuments turning Caboto and Colombo into national myths and symbols of Italian Canadians ends up affecting the relationships between local Italian-Canadian communities and Indigenous peoples. Possible alternatives may change attitudes towards Indigenous peoples, thus promoting a new solidarity with the Italian-Canadian communities across the country.
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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 | 0.005 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.026 | 0.028 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.010 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.007 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.006 | 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".