MétaCan
Menu
Back to cohort
Record W4414371519 · doi:10.1093/notesj/gjaf093

‘First Peoples’: Laurens Van Der Post’s Usage of the Term Antedating The OED Entry

2025· article· en· W4414371519 on OpenAlex

Why this work is in the frame

A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.

aboutThe title or abstract carries a Canadian signal from the geographic lexicon.
no affNo Canadian affiliation: this work is invisible to an affiliation-only frame.
No Canadian affiliation. An affiliation-only frame, the usual design, would never have seen this work. It is one of the works that make the case for inverting the frame.

Bibliographic record

VenueNotes and Queries · 2025
Typearticle
Languageen
FieldArts and Humanities
TopicLinguistic research and analysis
Canadian institutionsnot available
Fundersnot available
KeywordsIndigenousPosition (finance)Term (time)Proper noun

Abstract

fetched live from OpenAlex

According to the Oxford English Dictionary, 'First People(s)' (also written uncapitalized) is a chiefly Canadian term: '(Usually in plural) Indigenous peoples in Canada, considered collectively; First Nations, Inuit, and M etis peoples; (also more generally) the Indigenous peoples of any country or region'.The OED further dates the earliest known use of the noun to the title of a 1973 book, The first peoples in Quebec; a reference work on the history, environment, economic and legal position of the Indians and Inuit of Quebec, by Toby Ornstein. 1 I have found no scholarly accounts which adduce an earlier usage.However, some fifteen years earlier than Ornstein's book, Laurens van der Post can be seen using the term in whatas I will demonstrate-is an identical sense.This absence of a reference to Van der Post is particularly puzzling considering his two key texts which I discuss are frequently cited in other entries. 2 Van der Post was an Afrikaner South African who established himself as a leading public intellectual and prolific author in the UK during the second half of the 20th century.His public and more learned-literary career converged on the topic of the Bushman, 3 the collective name for a number

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.

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)0.000
metaresearch head score (Gemma)0.001
Version: codex-gemma-dda1882f352aValidation status: machine_predicted_unvalidated
Candidate categoriesnone
Consensus categoriesnone
DomainCandidate signal: none · Consensus signal: none
Study designCandidate signal: Theoretical or conceptual · Consensus signal: none
GenreCandidate signal: Empirical · Consensus signal: Empirical
Teacher disagreement score0.706
Threshold uncertainty score0.995

Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category

CategoryCodexGemma
Metaresearch0.0000.001
Meta-epidemiology (narrow)0.0000.000
Meta-epidemiology (broad)0.0000.000
Bibliometrics0.0000.000
Science and technology studies0.0010.000
Scholarly communication0.0000.000
Open science0.0000.000
Research integrity0.0000.000
Insufficient payload (model declined to judge)0.0010.000

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 head0.016
GPT teacher head0.250
Teacher spread0.235 · 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