‘Destination Indigenous’: Wilderness Tourism, White Guilt, and Indigenous Ghosts in Algernon Blackwood's Canadian Gothic
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.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Blackwood's Canadian stories offer a version of Gothic wilderness-tourism terror, informed by an inherent ambivalence and repressed guilt about the British ‘colonizer’ entering traditional Indigenous territory. The encounter with Indigenous peoples and cultures, even as these cultures are recognized as more holistic and authentic than rational British subjects, is marked by a distinct discomfort. The British tourists, for all that they want to become one with nature, experience themselves encompassed by a hostile natural environment in which they are aware of themselves as intruders. Indigenous cultures in these stories are either threatening spectres (‘The Valley of the Beasts’; ‘The Haunted Island’; ‘The Wendigo’) or forlorn remnants (‘Running Wolf’), in both instances highlighting the irrepressible guilt that stalks the white intruder who unconsciously courts an experience of self-dissolution as expiation. If the repressed content in these stories is the fact of colonization, entering the territory as a foreign element, an invader, represents a form of uncanny intrusion through which the disowned past returns. However, in Blackwood's stories, the characters seek out this memory of disownment. As a form of colonial expiation, Blackwood's Canadian gothics enact the process identified by Renée Bergland in The National Uncanny, whereby Indigenous ghosts (and monsters) are internalized within the colonizer's imagination as spectres of both guilt and desire.
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 imitationNot 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.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 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 it