Preserving Cultural Heritage in Indigenous Pandemic Fiction: “Coming-to” Stories of Resistance in Cherie Dimaline’s <i>The Marrow Thieves</i>
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This study intends to investigate Indigenous pandemic fiction through an analysis of The Marrow Thieves by Métis writer Cherie Dimaline. By depicting the journey of the Métis protagonist Frenchie, the novel explores Indigenous identity in a dystopian scenario where non-Indigenous people have succumbed to a plague affecting the ability to dream. Taking into consideration Jan Assmann’s concept of cultural memory and N. Scott Momaday’s depiction of the power of language, the paper would focus on the role of storytelling and linguistic heritage in the process of ‘survivance’ of Indigenous identity. The novel outlines dreams as spaces of resistance bound to the protection of cultural identity, by also revisiting the history of forced assimilation through the Residential School System. Frenchie’s journey presents the act of dreaming as the ultimate symbol of hope in a posthuman scenario where humankind has lost control over the Earth.
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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 | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.016 | 0.019 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.007 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| 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".