“The Seed of Christianity Among this Barbarism” in Seventeenth-Century New France
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This paper investigates Saint Joseph de Sillery, the Jesuit missionaries’ first “experimental” settlement in New France, using an “east-facing” or “Innu-centric” re-reading of the des Jésuites de la Nouvelle France, or The Jesuit Relations and Allied Documents, Travels, and Explorations of the Jesuit Missionaries in New France 1610–1791. In doing so, this paper works to dislodge the common misconception that the Innu peoples involved were passive victims of the Jesuit’s conversion efforts. By examining the Relations against the context in which they were written to distinguish between the Jesuit’s strategic depiction of their missionary agenda and the actual lived experiences of the Innu population who resided at Sillery, this essay re-constructs an internal history of the mission settlement. This alternative perspective challenges the narrative of “cultural suicide,” which is often adopted by scholars based on the Jesuit’s writings. As such, through a careful re-examination of the Relations, this paper exposes the Innu peoples’ use of Sillery as an opportunity to advance their position, therefore deeming the settlement a successful example of cultural preservation and resistance against complete conversion.
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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 | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.014 | 0.012 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.003 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 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".