Northern Paiutes of the Malheur: High Desert Reckoning in Oregon Country
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Pacific Northwest mythology has long asserted a tale of peaceful transition from Indigenous homelands to white civilization. If one squints hard, this case can be made for a few spots west of the Cascade Range, but it was never true for the east side. Since 2006, a half dozen excellent scholarly works have traced the breathtaking violence against Bannocks, Cayuses, Colvilles, Modocs, Nez Perces, Paiutes, Shoshones, Umatillas, Warm Springs, and Yakamas from the 1840s to the 1880s, but since the publication of Sarah Winnemucca's Life among the Paiutes (1883), these tales have been told mainly by nonacademics. The lawyer David H. Wilson Jr.'s Northern Paiutes of the Malheur offers the latest narrative, promising to bare what has “remained hidden for almost 150 years” (p. xviii). Such an attorney's brief might prevail in front of a jury, but scholars will yearn for more complexity at many junctures. Wilson's aim, aided by descendant informants, is to defend the reputation of the leader Egan, long blamed for the Paiutes' participation in the Bannock War of 1878. Unlike most recent works, Wilson's uses Anglicized exonyms for Indigenous groups and only lightly treats the internal kin and band politics that often divided Indigenous people in moments of geopolitical tension. Similarly, the early era of settler invasion and the brutal Snake War of the late 1860s are painted with a broad brush, even though the war is important for explaining why Egan was reluctant, even in the face of abuses on the reservation, to take up arms against white settlers and the government. Wilson nevertheless makes a case for why historians are wrong about Egan, and why blame should rest on a rival band leader named Oits/Oitsi. Wilson's witnesses include a heroic reservation agent, a military officer, and the Winnemucca family; the defendants include a platoon of venal and violent settlers, a general, and Office of Indian Affairs personnel on four reservations and in Washington, D.C.
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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 | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.005 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.007 | 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".