Childrearing in the Context of Settler-Colonial Genocide: A Literary Analysis of Tanya Tagaq's <i>Split Tooth</i>
Bibliographic record
Abstract
With growing discussion on the state of the Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls (MMIWG) crisis, Tanya Tagaq's breathtaking debut novel Split Tooth tackles the cultural implications of the crisis on Indigenous communities with striking literary prowess. Approaching this text from the perspective of contemporary scholarship on settler-colonial genocide, this article examines the presentation of Indigenous motherhood in the text, drawing connections to ethnographic studies on motherhood in the context of genocide and reproductive exploitation of Indigenous Canadian women. I argue that Tagaq's narrative is indicative of the scrutiny that Indigenous women face when they become mothers under this settler-colonial system through a foregrounding of intergenerational trauma and non-Western conceptualizations of “good motherhood.” Moreover, I analyze the figurative language Tagaq uses to communicate her experience, establishing that the narrative itself acts as a form of resistance through the decentering of Eurocentric constructions of idealized motherhood and nurturance.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
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 | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 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 itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, 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".