Review Essay: First-Nations, Métis, and Inuit Drama from Playwrights Canada Press
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Both North and South of the Great Lakes, literary critics and thinkers such as Julian NoiseCat and Madeline Sayat have been hailing a "New Native Renaissance."Yet, while whitestream U.S. theatres have recently been waking up to Indigenous playwrights such as Larissa FastHorse, Mary Kathryn Nagle, and DeLanna Studi, play development, production, and publication in Canada has long been ahead of their southern counterparts, as evidenced by the output of Playwrights Canada Press.Even so, the press's recent publications particularly demonstrate the variety and strength of current First Nations, Inuit, and Métis playwrights.Medicine Shows: Indigenous Performance Culture, by Métis playwright / dramaturg / director Yvette Nolan, provides a critical counterpart to these plays, demonstrating the web of interconnections between artists, development processes, and production companies as a fractal of "the interconnectedness of all things."After all, as Nolan writes, Indigenous theatre calls attention to connection, and reconnects "through the act of remembering, through building community, and by negotiating solidarities across communities" (1-3).As Nolan draws upon her prodigious memory as a longtime participant and former Artistic Director of Native Earth Performing Arts, she navigates the web of genealogy of young actors who become playwrights, young playwrights who become leaders, and transcultural failures whose honesty encourages new and more informed attempts.Her approach contextualizes contemporary dramas by Indigenous playwrights within the playwrights' own cultural systems, but also acknowledges
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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 | 0.007 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.005 | 0.010 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.007 | 0.007 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.010 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.007 | 0.006 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.023 | 0.004 |
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".