Reckoning with the Legacy of Land-Grant University Libraries, Archives, and Special Collections as Ventures of Pioneer Veneration
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Land-grant colleges and universities in the United States, and by extension their libraries and archives, seek to uphold a three-part mission of teaching, research, and service, while also focusing on equality of access, regardless of class. The admirability of that mission, however, is tempered by “genesis amnesia,” where, as Pierre Bourdieu and Jean-Claude Passeron say, “societies cover up or erase the origins of policies or institutions in order to obfuscate the social constructions that underlie them.” Other former settler colonies, such as Canada, maintain similarly structured and afflicted colleges and universities. For many institutions, the terms “land-grant,” or in Canadian contexts “land-endowed” or “land-financed,” act as a veneer, covering up and at times venerating an extractive and traumatic process by which Indigenous peoples were dispossessed of their lands. In this reflective case study, we define pioneer veneration as a symptom of colonialism and describe recent efforts to challenge it within our own library and archives. Using two collections containing Indigenous knowledges but not (primarily) Indigenous belongings, we explore our attempts to challenge pioneer veneration and seek out more impactful and purposefully reparative avenues of service to Indigenous patrons and stakeholders. By specifically defining the term pioneer veneration and discussing our institution’s effort to counter it in two specific collections, we hope to expand the lens of the types of collections that can be part of decolonization work and offer some replicable examples of work that redresses white supremacy and colonialism in institutional archives.
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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 | 0.006 | 0.010 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.031 | 0.072 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.016 | 0.011 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.014 |
| 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".