Bibliographic record
Abstract
Western studies of Indigenous religious traditions have historically been rooted in colonial systems of knowledge, dominated by Eurocentric understandings of both “religion” and “civilization.” The application of these categories in studies of Indigenous religious traditions has resulted in major misrepresentations or misinterpretations of Indigenous religions. The resulting studies have also often been used to police the "authenticity" of Indigenous traditions, falsely identifying any "modern" aspects of Indigenous traditions (including engagements with Christianity) as evidence of the deterioration of Indigenous religious and cultural practices. These misrepresentations of Indigenous religious traditions demonstrate the need in religious studies to de-center settler colonial categories of religion. The following paper presents a case study of misrepresentations of Métis religion through an examination of works on Métis historical and religious figure, Sœur Marguerite-Marie, née Sara Riel, who was one of the first Métis Grey Nuns, the first Métis missionary in the Northwest, and sister of famed Métis leader, Louis Riel. The ways in which Riel’s religious affiliations have been analyzed and misrepresented is illustrative and symptomatsanic of deep-seated conventions within Western scholarship on mixed-heritage Indigenous peoples and syncretic Indigenous religions specifically, and of all Indigenous religions more generally. Examining the misinterpretations of Riel’s religiosity provides a concentrated look into how the employment of Western categories of religion can result in the overlooking, and simultaneous undermining, of Indigenous expressions of both religious and national identity.
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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 | 0.005 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.020 | 0.021 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.012 | 0.011 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.009 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.008 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.022 | 0.007 |
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".