The ‘spiritual borderlands’ of the far Canadian north: the ministries of William Carpenter Bompas and Robert McDonald in comparative context
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Anglican Bishop William Carpenter Bompas and Archdeacon Robert McDonald spent nearly forty years in the far American north ‘spreading the word’ to Indigenous peoples living along the Yukon River in the second half of the nineteenth century. This article investigates their work primarily among the Gwichyà Gwich’in from their arrival in the 1860s to the mid-1870s when the 141st meridian west was established, creating an international border between Alaska and the Yukon, the United States and British America. The border’s creation had enormous implications for the Hudson Bay Company at Fort Yukon (Gwichyaa Zheh) because it was discovered to be west of the international boundary in Alaska and was moved further east into today’s Yukon Territories. The border forced Indigenous people to pick a side, American or British, and tested loyalties to their minister. The ‘spiritual borderland’ thus offers a window into the lives and ministries of two important northern missionaries during the initial contact period, as well as assessing their successes and failures among northern peoples.
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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 | 0.003 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.046 | 0.044 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.008 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.006 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 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 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".