“What Is to Become of the Native Peoples of the North?”: Social Science and the Politics of Northern Development, 1954–73
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This article examines the history of the Northern Coordination and Research Centre (ncrc), a semi-autonomous research group within the Department of Northern Affairs and National Resources. From 1954 to 1973, the ncrc coordinated government social research in the North, distributed funding to northern studies programs at Canadian universities, and commissioned social scientists, especially anthropologists, to evaluate government programs aimed at “modernizing” Indigenous communities in the North. Researchers soon came into conflict with government officials, however, and began openly critiquing government social policies related to subjects such as resource extraction, community development, and the influence of transient workers from southern Canada. ncrc researchers were gradually isolated from policy-making circles, and the centre was shut down. Drawing from reports of the ncrc and correspondence from the Department of Northern Affairs, this article depicts tensions between social scientists and government policy-makers as representative of deeper rifts between academic and government research. These rifts highlight the government’s evolving antipathy towards social research as a foreshadowing of major social and political developments of the 1970s.
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 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 | 0.003 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.008 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.013 | 0.025 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.006 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| 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".