“Something that is very old, very honourable and should be very precious to you” : an Indigenous feminist analysis of the Salish Weavers Guild, 1966-1986
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This thesis examines the work and history of the Salish Weavers Guild (formally entitled “the Original Salish Weavers and Crafts of Koh-Kwa-Leet-Sah”), a collective of predominantly Stó:lō women weavers that operated in the second half of the twentieth century. The Guild produced an incredible array of woven materials, including blankets, robes, sashes, and baskets, among other items, and was made up of roughly forty women and girls. The historical and public narrative behind the Guild’s creation and work thus far has predominantly emphasized the influence of the late Oliver Wells, a Chilliwack area farmer who had built friendships with many of the women and their families. This thesis steps away from this and specifically explores the political circumstances in which the Guild operated. The author draws on an Indigenous feminist framework to challenge settler assumptions around Indigenous women’s work, particularly critiquing settler views on political/public and non-political/private binary. This binary has substantially influenced how academics, and the broader settler public, understand, document and respond to Indigenous assertions of sovereignty and Indigenous resistance. By analyzing archival materials that documented the inner workings of the Guild, newspaper articles detailing their work, and additional literature that defines and articulates Stó:lō ontologies, epistemologies, and cosmologies, this thesis identifies the Guild as a historically powerful example of Indigenous women’s assertions of sovereignty. More specifically, this thesis identifies how the women of the Guild asserted sovereignty over three critical areas: determining membership based on a collective definition of belonging, the transmission of intergenerational knowledge, and publicly articulating relational ties between Stó:lō individuals and non-Indigenous public figures.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
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) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.020 | 0.022 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.003 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.005 | 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".