Refusing Confederation: Indigenous Feminist Performance as a Tool for Colonial Reckoning and Community (Re)Building
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract: In 2017, the Kika'ige Historical Society, an Indigenous women's performance troupe based in Guelph, Canada, created Tabling 150 in response to celebrations of Canada's sesquicentennial. Tabling 150 presented an opportunity for Indigenous women to engage in truth-telling amid celebrations of settler-colonial nationalism. By taking on personas of the "Grannies of Confederation," a play on the title of the well-known painting The Fathers of Confederation , the performers participated in Native feminist spatial practice, creating new orders through felt theory, presencing, and enacting refusals within their time and place in the academy. Drawing on interviews with the performers, we examine questions of the felt experience of doing Indigenous artivist resistance. Data from the participant performers was inductively coded, revealing four prominent themes: connecting with ancestors, taking space as resistance, community solidarity and empowerment, and Indigenous women's work in spatial practice while Indigenizing the academy. The analysis revealed that performance is an effective tool for calling out Canada's mistreatment of Indigenous Peoples at Confederation and the social inequities encoded into Canadian law during a period of settler-colonial celebration. The collective act of truth-telling by Indigenous performers strengthened a community through which it became safe to reflect upon and challenge colonial norms.
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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 | 0.009 | 0.011 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.026 | 0.036 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.008 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.009 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.007 | 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".