From hunters to herders: Race, reindeer and imperial expansion in Alaska c.1890–1906
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This article traces the work of the American educationalist and missionary Sheldon Jackson as he introduced non-native reindeer to Northern Alaska. Jackson sought to improve what he considered to be a dire economic situation unfolding amongst the Indigenous Iñupiat community. The scheme involved recruiting Chukchi reindeer herders inhabiting the Siberian Peninsula to instruct the local Iñupiat communities on the handling and husbandry of these non-human Arctic animals. Following tensions between these Indigenous herders and the leaders of the colonial reindeer station, however, the Chukchi recruits were dismissed, and were replaced by a group of Sámi reindeer herders that Jackson had transported from Sápmi. Drawing from recent geographical literatures that offer Indigenous perspectives on human/non-human relations, and combining these with ongoing scholarship examining colonial histories and legacies in the Arctic, this article contextualises this troubling imperial intervention amidst broader processes of nineteenth-century American territorial expansion. Studying the construction of a racialised ‘hierarchy of acceptability’ with regards to Arctic Indigenous peoples based on their relationships with non-human animals, the article critiques the problematic ‘civilizing’ mission that lay behind Jackson's colonial activities in Alaska. The article thus concludes by arguing that Jackson's reindeer project was just one of several colonial disruptions to Indigenous human/non-human relationships that were to have dire consequences across the circumpolar North. • Demonstrates value of incorporating Indigenous and decolonial perspectives within historical animal geographies. • Critiques the hierarchy of acceptability constructed by Sheldon Jackson and his colleagues with regards to Arctic Indigenous peoples. • Draws attention to the multiplicity of human/non-human relationships across the Circumpolar North. • Reveals the importance of animal interactions in historical processes of colonialism and imperialism in the Arctic.
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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 | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.006 | 0.004 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 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".