BRIDGING THE GAP: DREW HAYDEN TAYLOR, NATIVE CANADIAN PLAYWRIGHT IN HIS TIMES
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In his relatively short career, Drew Hayden Taylor has amassed a significant level of popular and critical success, becoming the most widely produced Native playwright in the world.Despite nearly twenty years of successful works for the theatre, little extended academic discussion has emerged to contextualize Taylor's work and career.This dissertation addresses this gap by focusing on Drew Hayden Taylor as a writer whose theatrical work strives to bridge the distance between Natives and Non-Natives.Taylor does so in part by humorously demystifying the perceptions of Native people.Taylor's approaches to humor and demystification reflect his own approaches to cultural identity and his expressions of that identity.Initially this dissertation will focus briefly upon historical elements which served to silence Native peoples while initiating and enforcing the gap of misunderstanding between Natives and non-Natives.Following this discussion, this dissertation examines significant moments which have shaped the re-emergence of the Native voice and encouraged the formation of the Contemporary Native Theatre in Canada.Finally, this dissertation will analyze Taylor's methodology of humorous demystification of Native peoples and stories on the stage.Of primary focus in this discussion is Taylor's use of a distinctly Native aesthetic as a means of constructing his works for the theatre, despite surface appearances of primarily western influence.To provide evidence of this Native aesthetic, Taylor's work and aesthetic goals, as expressed by Taylor, will be explored critically: First through a post-colonial critical framework iv and then through a Native-centered critical structure.Following these discussions, this study will focus on a textual analysis of several of Taylor's works for the theatre.These analyses demonstrate the manner in which Taylor actively works to demystify perceptions of Natives by utilizing Native sensibilities of humor, character, story, and setting.This dissertation supplies answers to questions such as: What are the historical elements that serve to foster Taylor's emergence as a leading voice in Canadian Native theatre?What are Taylor's personal aesthetic goals for his theatrical work, and do these goals arise from primarily a Western or Native influenced perspective?v For my Mother, Susan R. (Earl) Adamek, my Father, Jonathan T. Young, and my brothers: Evan T. Young and Phillip E. Young.To those teachers who encourage me to build and cross bridges on my own, especially Bob and Marcy Brower, Circle M
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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 | 0.003 | 0.006 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.030 | 0.009 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.010 | 0.007 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.004 | 0.009 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.013 | 0.003 |
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".