Cultural Ventriloquism and Eighteenth-Century Fiction: Teaching Lahontan’s Dialogues avec un sauvage in the Early 2020s
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This article discusses teaching Lahontan’s 1703 Dialogues avec un sauvage to twenty-first century students at an American public university in the wake of the scandal that surrounded Jeanine Cummins’ 2020 novel American Dirt, which was widely denounced for appropriating a narrative beyond the author’s lived experience. In allowing that Lahontan’s apocryphal dialogue with a Canadian Native American, Adario (based on the real-life Haudenosaunee sachem Kandiaronk), might deserve to be “canceled” in a similar way, students were invited to adopt a critical posture with respect to this highly critical text, eschewing veneration for engagement with ideas. The result was a robust conversation about how this fictionalized encounter might or might not allow for the emergence of an authentic Native American critique of European values and the particular relevance for contemporary students of the ways in which Adario frames consent as both a political and interpersonal imperative of free people.
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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 | 0.005 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.026 | 0.034 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.008 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.006 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 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".