What Was Said to Me: The Life of Sti'tum'atul'wut, a Cowichan Woman By Ruby Peter, in collaboration with Helene Demers, Victoria, Canada: Royal BC Museum. 2021. pp. 240.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
What Was Said to Me is an oral history of a Cowichan woman, Sti'tum'atul'wut, also known as Ruby Peter.Her life stories and teachings were audio-recorded and transcribed by Helene Demers between 1997 and 1998.Demers purposefully maintains the original telling and Peter's voice with all its repetitions and colloquialisms.The book includes 26 short chapters that cover a range of topics from Peter's childhood memories to challenges in adult life.It is full of life teachings that guide and direct Indigenous families who were stripped of their languages, spiritual and religious beliefs, and practices.Peter's stories open a window into the world of the Indigenous Cowichan Tribes of Vancouver Island in British Columbia (Canada), that have suffered oppression for many years.Chapters 3, 4, 11, and 15 of the book focus on residential and day schools that were established to assimilate Indigenous children into dominant Western culture.Peter discusses children who lost their language and did not have the opportunity to receive teachings from their parents and Elders as they were forced to stay in the schools for many years.The book also uncovers stories of Masks being taken away, Indian dances being forbidden, and potlatch being stopped.People were punished and imprisoned for speaking their language and following their cultures and traditions.Sti'tum'atul'wut was one of few Cowichan women who were fortunate to learn old teachings from her mother and the Elders.She was intentionally prepared to become a Thi'tha, "a helper of the people."The book offers a glimpse into the rituals and healing practices of the Cowichan.Stories about the Thi'tha line, the Sxwuyxwi Mask, and the Rattler have a special place in the book.These stories provide an intimate look into the lives and beliefs of Sti'tum'atul'wut and her community.In addition, they tell us about the importance of language, knowledge, and spirituality for the Cowichan people and how they passed these down through storytelling.The book discloses a life of relentless and unglamorous hard work, from berry picking to cleaning white people's houses.One can easily be amazed at Peter's resilience despite the harsh trials of colonialism.Her life was not easy given the colonialist regime, war, bringing up foster children, and fighting with serious illness and alcohol addictions of close ones.However, she never stopped striving for the best and caring for her loved ones.The beliefs of the Cowichan people are important threads woven throughout the book.Peter firmly believes in the importance of these teachings and provides life examples of how they have informed her understanding of life.She observes the importance of eating the right food during pregnancy to promote healthy child development, casting a spell on orphans to prevent their injuries, and preventing children from visiting cemeteries, among other examples.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| 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 teacher head, 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".