Bibliographic record
Abstract
Interdisciplinary scholarship in the fields of Native American and Indigenous Studies (NAIS), ethnography, anthropology, and history has widely debated the powerful biography of St. Catherine Tekakwitha, the first Indigenous saint. This essay close-reads life writings by and about Tekakwitha as so death-centric that they can be referred to as “death writing.” Death writings document relationships among the living and the dead. This essay examines Indigenous materials alongside a colonial text: first Tekakwitha’s participation in the tradition of wampum, followed by Jesuit explorer and author Pierre François Xavier de Charlevoix’s obituary of her appended to his History and description of New-France (1744). This dual approach affords two perspectives on the power of Tekakwitha’s memory: both Tekakwitha and Charlevoix contributed to the emergence of modern forms of life writing in the eighteenth century. I present Charlevoix’s monumental text as an obituary on a macro level, of the dying French colonial and Jesuit order, and on a micro level, with its appended collection of obituaries of Indigenous individuals, with the foremost presented as Tekakwitha. I argue that New-France asserts the importance of France, the Jesuits, and Charlevoix himself, by aligning them with the European project of colonization and by invoking the power of deceased Indigenous individuals, especially Tekakwitha. Simultaneously, Tekakwitha’s death writing has functioned as a reservoir of power sustained by the controversy of her characterization as an exemplary Indigenous woman. The essay concludes by asserting Tekakwitha as an “active presence” who continues to shape discourse on her legacy.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.005 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 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 teacher head, 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".