“So Great Was the Rush of Water”: Speculative Histories of Other-than-Human Survivance Against the Trent-Severn Waterway
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract In this essay, the author employs survivance—a concept of active and agential survival developed by Anishinaabe author and scholar Gerald Vizenor—to explore decolonial other-than-human opposition to the Trent-Severn Waterway, a roughly 240-mile-long system of locks, canals, and dams built onto waterbodies throughout Central Ontario, Canada, as a case study for more broadly considering the decolonial roles of other-than-human beings. If decolonization is to proceed in accordance with Indigenous futurities in a settler-colonial Canadian context, then plants, animals, fungi, waters, rocks, and other other-than-human beings ought to be considered as having agency, animacy, and spirit, as they do in the ontologies of many Indigenous Nations. After outlining ways that the Trent-Severn Waterway enacts settler-colonial violence against other-than-human beings, the author speculates on floods, logjams, disease outbreaks, and similar acts as histories of other-than-human resistance, refusal, resentment, and resurgence—utilizing the work of Indigenous scholars including Audra Simpson, Scott Richard Lyons, Glen Sean Coulthard, and Leanne Betasamosake Simpson. These speculative histories serve to illustrate how settler and other non-Indigenous scholars and activists, interested in supporting Indigenous Nations in dismantling settler colonialism, might better attend to other-than-human beings as potential agents and teachers of decolonization.
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 | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.020 | 0.049 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 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".