Bibliographic record
Abstract
The Kaska are native to the Canadian regions of northwestern British Columbia, southern Yukon, and southwestern Northwest Territories. This entry focuses primarily on the Upper Liard Kaska (located northwest of Lower Post, British Columbia) around the time of 1900, predominantly using reconstructive ethnographic information collected by principal authority anthropologist John Honigmann during field expeditions in the 1940s. For the Kaska, continuous contact with Europeans began in the 1820s at the Hudson Bay Company post Fort Halkett, on Liard River. During this time, Protestant and Catholic missionaries visited the area, but did not start continuous work until the establishment of the mission at McDame Creek on the Dease River in 1926. Consequently, this entry focuses on Kaska beliefs and practices as they existed prior to major changes as a result of contact with foreigners. Traditional Kaska beliefs recognized a variety of supernatural beings, including spirits, souls of the departed, and monsters. However, these beings are not described in substantial detail, perhaps because, as Honigmann (1954:100) notes, “cosmological speculation remained unelaborated in aboriginal Kaska culture.” Kaska religious practitioners were known as shamans and specialized in curing, divination, and clairvoyance. Anyone could become a shaman and gain powers by successfully completing a vision quest, during which the individual would dream of animals and communicate with their spirits. Ethnographic materials reference religious ceremonies including the vision quest (undertaken by young men around the time of puberty), as well as summer dances and potlatches. The most important socio-political unit among the Kaska is the local band, which is typically comprised of the matrilocal extended family and led by the head of the family. The Upper Liard River Kaska were divided into two exogamous matrilineal moieties: the Wolf and the Crow. For the Kaska, religion is not a distinct sphere of life. It is interwoven throughout the functioning of society as a whole. Consequently, this entry considers the religious group to be coterminous with the society itself.
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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 | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.008 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.004 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.163 | 0.062 |
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".