“An Indian of Considerable Consequence”: British Travellers, “Big Chiefs,” and Settler Colonialism in 1790s’ Upper Canada
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This article examines the travelogues of two late eighteenth-century British travellers: Patrick Campbell and Isaac Weld. Travel writing was a pursuit intimately tied to promoting empire, and by endorsing Upper Canada as an attractive destination for British settlers, both travellers encouraged the dispossession of Anishinaabe and Haudenosaunee peoples. As tourists, Campbell and Weld were also fascinated by the idea of “Indian” chiefs. Realizing that Upper Canada was as much an Indigenous world as a British one, and recognizing the role played by the Haudenosaunee in imperial defence, they turned their fascination with chiefs to rhetorical advantage. Ignorant of actual Haudenosaunee governance, Campbell and Weld instead invested sovereignty in select Kanyen’kehaka men who conformed to their pre-conceived notions of what chiefs ought to be like. Friendship between these men and the British proved useful in travel writing, justifying British acts of settler colonialism on the basis that, unlike the Americans who waged wars to dispossess the Northwest Confederacy, the British were welcome and the moral power on the continent. The importance given to chiefs to secure this friendship reminds scholars that what Susan Hill called the “Big Chief” school of analysis has a long literary past that has historically justified empire.
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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 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.031 | 0.022 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.009 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.005 |
| 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".