The Prevalence and Correlates of Residential School Denialism in Canada
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract For more than 150 years, politicians, the federal government, and missionary churches misled Canadians about deaths, abuse, and the genocidal intent in residential schools for Indigenous children. More recently, the identification of suspected unmarked graves at former school sites has triggered a renewed spread of misinformation denying the harmful legacy of residential schools. To what extent does the Canadian public endorse residential school denialism? Can education counter this misinformation? In this study, we develop and test a scale for measuring residential school denialism. We find that nearly one in five non-Indigenous Canadians agree with denialist claims, while an equal share feel they do not know enough to offer an opinion. Denialist beliefs are more common among men, conservatives, those with anti-Indigenous attitudes, and white Canadians who strongly identify with their racial in-group. In an experiment, we also show that educational information reduces non-opinions and increases the likelihood of rejecting denialist arguments.
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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 | 0.010 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.005 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.005 | 0.003 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.002 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 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".