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Decolonial Interruptions of Settler Time in Tanya Tagaq’s Art

2025· article· en· W4410206069 on OpenAlexaboutno aff
Laura Castor

Bibliographic record

VenueEcozon European Journal of Literature Culture and Environment · 2025
Typearticle
Languageen
FieldSocial Sciences
TopicGlobal Maritime and Colonial Histories
Canadian institutionsnot available
Fundersnot available
KeywordsArtPsychoanalysisPsychology

Abstract

fetched live from OpenAlex

This article discusses two texts by the Inuit musician and writer Tanya Tagaq to demonstrate the need for honoring Inuit relationships with other-than-human beings through decolonial interruptions of settler time in Canada: a well-publicized photograph Tagaq posted on Twitter in March 2014 of her infant daughter beside a freshly killed seal, and the genre-crossing book Split Tooth. Using Walter Mignolo’s approach to decolonial gestures, I explore the #sealfie photograph and the novel as textured evocations of the Inuit worldview that was rendered invisible in much of the commentary on Twitter about the #sealfie picture. Both the #sealfie controversy and the book have larger ramifications for how the difficult process of reconciliation between Inuit communities and Canadian settlers is understood. Tagaq’s development of form, word, and image allow for reader responses within what Mary Louise Pratt calls cultural “contact zones” (1991) where small shifts in awareness of the continuity and dignity of continued Inuit presence on the land, despite colonization, are possible. In the first part of the article, I discuss recent historical and theoretical contexts, introducing Mark Rifkin’s approach to “settler time” as a theoretical lens. I then consider the #sealfie issue, focusing on how Tagaq transformed the attacks on her political stance and personhood as an Inuit mother. In the third part of the article, I expand my discussion to show how Tagaq transforms the epistemic terms of the debate through storytelling and poetry in Split Tooth.

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 imitation

Not 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.

metaresearch head score (Codex)0.001
metaresearch head score (Gemma)0.000
Version: codex-gemma-dda1882f352aValidation status: machine_predicted_unvalidated
Candidate categoriesnone
Consensus categoriesnone
DomainCandidate signal: none · Consensus signal: none
Study designCandidate signal: Not applicable · Consensus signal: Not applicable
GenreCandidate signal: Empirical · Consensus signal: none
Teacher disagreement score0.537
Threshold uncertainty score0.317

Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category

CategoryCodexGemma
Metaresearch0.0010.000
Meta-epidemiology (narrow)0.0000.000
Meta-epidemiology (broad)0.0000.000
Bibliometrics0.0000.000
Science and technology studies0.0000.000
Scholarly communication0.0000.000
Open science0.0000.000
Research integrity0.0000.000
Insufficient payload (model declined to judge)0.0000.000

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.

Opus teacher head0.004
GPT teacher head0.226
Teacher spread0.222 · how far apart the two teachers sit on this one work
Validation statusscore_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it

Classification

machine, unvalidated

Machine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.

The models applied no category: nothing in the taxonomy fit this work.
Study designNot applicable
Domainnot available
GenreEmpirical

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".

Quick stats

Citations0
Published2025
Admission routes1
Has abstractyes

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Same venueEcozon European Journal of Literature Culture and EnvironmentSame topicGlobal Maritime and Colonial HistoriesFrench-language works237,207