Fight or flight: reimagining Charles Jesse “Buffalo” Jones' conservation efforts through a bison's embodied perspective
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In this speculative historical essay, I employ Buffalo Jones' records to expand upon who can have a voice in the archive, thereby undermining the anthropocentrism inherent in the chronicling of bison conservation. Indeed, this work of “fictocriticism” deploys empathy to recenter the more-than-human voice and ironically uses the observations of the bison's tormentor to move beyond a simplistic anthropomorphic representation. The essay briefly introduces Jones and his contentious legacy as a murderer of Indigenous peoples, buffalo hunter and, later, a central figure in early bison conservation. The essay then shifts into a first-person account of the pursuit and capture of the last remaining southern plains bison from the Texas Panhandle from a cow's embodied perspective. The bison's first-person perspective as one of Jones' prey brings an immediacy to a history that has often been retold to center man's mastery and supremacy. Finally, this essay employs footnotes as a critical intervention by connecting the speculative narrative to Jones' written accounts in published journals. These two narrative approaches demonstrate the significance of bison kinship and how anthropocentrism and white supremacy's entangled ideologies blinded Jones to the worthiness of these others' lifeways. The written submission is accompanied by two audio artworks based on this essay. In creating affective, sound-designed audio works, I have intentionally extracted the archival-research-based narrative from a white supremacist, a patriarchal written tradition for critical purposes.
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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 | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| 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".