Bigfoot, atmosphere, and storytelling in Harrison Hot Springs' Sasquatch Museum
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The Sasquatch Museum in Harrison Hot Springs, British Columbia, is a one-room gallery established in 2017 within the Tourism Harrison Greeting Centre. Though compact, the gallery makes full use of the space – the walls and ceiling are painted to mimic the forest surrounding Harrison Hot Springs, and there are three notable sections of display. The first, and largest, is the collection of material related to bigfoot hunting in BC, including eyewitness testimonials and casts of footprints. Beside this display are two smaller cases. The first case relates to the Sts'ailes (Chehalis) First Nation’s ancestral being Sa:sq’ets (Sasquatch), and includes a Sa:sq’ets mask repatriated from the Museum of Vancouver (MOV) in 2014. The final case of the museum is dedicated to primatological evidence for the existence of a bigfoot-like creature. In this thesis I answer the question: how does the Harrison Hot Springs Sasquatch Museum make use of Indigenous knowledge and imagery, western scientific data, and pop culture narratives in a highly stylized gallery atmosphere to further their particular perspective on bigfoot/Sasquatch? I will use the themes of atmosphere and folkloric narratives to develop a critical interpretation of this gallery space. This is, in part, a history and analysis of the development of the museum, sourced from interviews with Robert Reyerse (executive director of Tourism Harrison). It is also an interpretive analysis of the exhibits, as they stand today, based on my own visits. I examine how the museum displays pop cultural bigfoot narratives and Sts’ailes Sa:sq’ets ancestral knowledge, including how both interpretations come together.
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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 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.021 | 0.018 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.008 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.006 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 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".