Indigenous Representational Sovereignty: Once Were Warriors and Atanarjuat: The Fast Runner
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This chapter discusses films adapted by Indigenous filmmakers from Indigenous source material: Once Were Warriors (1994), adapted by Māori filmmaker Lee Tamahori from Alan Duff’s novel and Atanarjuat: The Fast Runner (2001), adapted by Inuit filmmaker Zacharias Kunuk for the Inuit production company Igloolik Isuma from an Inuit Traditional Story. This chapter examines the adaptations’ relationships Indigenous representational sovereignty and Barry Barclay’s notion of Fourth Cinema. Both internationally successful adaptations largely made with crew members from their respective communities, these films demonstrate that there is no monolithic version of Indigenous self-representation and self-determination. Controversial in both its incarnations, Once Were Warriors focuses on late-twentieth-century urban Māori life. Although the novel and film grapple with the legacy of colonialism, Pākehā presence is minimal in the novel and virtually absent from the film. Atanarjuat eschews non-Indigenous presence completely in its setting centuries prior to colonial contact, focusing on the fallout of homicidal discord within a community. Adapting an Inuit Traditional Story, entirely in Inuktitut, Atanarjuat derives from a source ‘text’ that exists in several different versions, with different resolutions to the community’s crisis. Both these adaptations alter their sources’ narrative resolutions, complicating questions of fidelity with respect to Indigenous culture.
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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 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.009 | 0.007 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| 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".