Bibliographic record
Abstract
PrefaCeThis book is about Roman Catholic missionaries and the ways that they thought and wrote about Indigenous people in the latter half of the nineteenth century.Its focus is very different from the one I had intended when I began my research in 2006.In the early spring of that year, I learned that the Société historique de Saint-Boniface (Winnipeg) had recently acquired and accessioned a collection of French-language Catholic mission records from the Métis community of Île-à-la-Crosse in northwestern Saskatchewan.The collection spanned nearly a century and a half, from the establishment of a Catholic missionary presence at Île-à-la-Crosse in 1845 to the completion of the last mission journal in 1988.It contained a wealth of information on the local community: a running chronicle of daily life, genealogies of congregant families, sacramental records, and more.Never before had the collection been available to lay researchers, so if I hurried, I would be the first to use it as a corpus of primary sources.Here, I thought, was a golden opportunity to produce a sweeping ethnohistorical study of a Métis community using methods that were tried, tested, and true: scholars have long relied-and continue relying-on mission records to yield qualitative and quantitative information on the historical Métis.My initial enthusiasm turned to confusion, however, when I examined the collection and found very few references to a local Métis population-the putative subject of my study-until the mid-1870s.Up to then, missionary record-keepers seemed to have referred to all local Indigenous people as "des sauvages," subcategorizing them according to linguistic criteria as "des Cris"
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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 | 0.001 | 0.005 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.003 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.004 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.541 | 0.361 |
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".