Bibliographic record
Abstract
This article explores Marian Engel’s portrayal of what Animal Studies scholar Donna J. Haraway terms “significant otherness” (the simultaneous interconnection and mysterious difference between animal and human life/connections) and othering as a form of dismissal and a perpetuation of colonial hierarchies of gendered and racial power. I explore the overlaps of Engel’s othering of Indigenous characters in the novel and the racism present in speciesism, exposing why the character of the bear is more knowable to the protagonist than Lucy Leroy (Cree). I offer a decolonial reading of this seminal Canadian text, drawing on Engel’s desire to disrupt literary utilization of animals as images of nationalism and emblems of patriotic virtue, while simultaneously exposing the prevalence of entrenched gendered and racial hierarchical perceptions of Indigenous women and relationships to nature. In offering this reading, I hope to suggest that decolonial readings offer us the tools to integrate the ideals expressed in Haraway’s “significant otherness” reading of companion-animal relationships with decoloniality and the deconstruction of hierarchies of power as pioneered by Indigenous authors, artists, and activists. This generates hope.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
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 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 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; 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".