Heritage, Parks Canada, and the Narrowing of Western Canadian History
Bibliographic record
Abstract
For decades, national historic sites have played a major role in helping shape the historical narrative in western Canada and throughout the country. In this Forum article I examine how heritage is defined and assess the way the early commemoration of historic sites in the west, including fur trade posts and battle sites associated with the North-West Resistance of 1885, set a conventional direction for what was important in western Canadian history and, just as significantly, what was not. I investigate the changing and at one time progressive role of historical research in Parks Canada, the agency responsible for managing these sites. I consider the later attempts by the agency to refute this innovative research in favour of a return to original, authorized, and archetypal colonialist messages, at the same time narrowing the scope of historical interpretation. Although very recent initiatives have attempted to broaden historic site interpretation in the West, Parks Canada is still faced with attempting to use commemorated and celebrated colonial spaces to communicate post-colonial messages.
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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) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.005 | 0.011 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.008 | 0.008 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.007 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.006 | 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".