“We Shall Go on Fighting”: The Political Activism of Kahnawà:ke Entertainers John and Louise McComber
Bibliographic record
Abstract
John and Louise McComber were a husband-and-wife team of entertainers who operated Chief Poking Fire’s Indian Village and Museum in the Kanien’kehá:ka (Mohawk) community of Kahnawà:ke during the middle decades of the twentieth century. The success of their Indian-themed tourist attraction was notable for bringing Indigenous entertainment work home and providing economic opportunity to many families in their community. In addition, it made for their distinctive coupling of entertainment work and political activism and enabled them to engage in a variety of issues of importance to Kahnawa’kehró:non, the Rotinonhsión:ni, and First Nations people in Canada in general. Based on a significant archive of McComber family papers and other primary source materials, this paper charts the development of their entertainment work and their political activities, which included efforts within Kahnawà:ke to re-establish traditional government and fight against land expropriation, support for Rotinonhsión:ni land claims and border-crossing rights, opposing forced enfranchisement and other elements of repressive and assimilationist federal Indian policies, and helping to advance the early development of pan-tribal organization in Canada.
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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 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.016 | 0.018 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.006 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| 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".