The Mismeasure of Manabozho: Unsettling the Science of the Mind in Henry R. Schoolcraft’s<i>Algic Researches</i>
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract This article recovers early Native American writing that challenges the premises of nineteenth-century mental science and its support for colonialism. It demonstrates how the manuscripts and correspondences of Irish-Ojibwe poet Jane Johnston Schoolcraft and her brother William Johnston, particularly Johnston’s translation of the Anishinaabe story of the simultaneously clever and foolish trickster Manabozho, contradict the ethnological speculations and editorial alterations made by Henry Rowe Schoolcraft, Jane’s husband and William’s employer, in his Algic Researches (1839). Henry sought to prove that Native Americans were intellectually stagnant, but Jane and William provided him with Ojibwe and Ottawa stories that promote collective adaptability and resilience. This collectivism is a useful hermeneutic through which to interpret Jane’s struggle with “melancholy thoughts” expressed in two drafts of her poem “The Contrast.” Instead of reading Jane as an Indigenous poet staggered by European knowledge, as Henry posits, scholars can more accurately root her mental state in the fragility of her kinship network during high-stakes treaty negotiations facilitated by her absent husband. This reexamination of the Johnston-Schoolcraft papers aids efforts to decolonize mental health, madness, and disability by piecing together Jane and William’s use of stories as equipment for living during a consequential period of transition for the Anishinaabe of present-day Michigan.In contrast to Henry’s project of evaluation and disqualification, William and Jane collected and shared their stories for their own project of preservation, carrying forward the recognition those tales invite that well-being and health are attributes of collectives rather than individuals.
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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 | 0.005 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.004 | 0.008 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 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; both teacher heads agree on what is shown here.
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".