"I Can Tell You Now": Métis Kinship Narratives in Community History Volumes
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In the late twentieth century, community history volumes flourished across the Prairies as small pioneer towns sought to document their histories by collecting written contributions from residents who had lived there over the years, including descendants of "original" homesteaders. Biographical narratives of my Anglo-Métis maternal great-great-grandparents, George Kirkness (1857-1932) and Caroline McNabb (1862-1954), were published in two such volumes, A Homesteader's Dream (1981) and Communities of Courage and Cordwood (1986). Although as a genre, these volumes contain the very performances of settler triumphalism that have dispossessed Métis families of our histories, the personal narratives therein can also offer insight into Métis kin and community structures, cultural knowledges, relational philosophies, and political agency. George and Caroline's biographies reflect a time of unprecedented upheavals in the social fabric of Métis society, including two armed resistances, a mass migration westward, the rapid expansion of the colonial state into the Northwest, and the breakdown of cultural cohesion after the Resistance conflicts of 1885. I examine their biographies through the lens of wāhkōhtowin (kinship, or being in relation), reframing Métis "identity" away from linear individualist models and toward integrative, expansive, community-oriented ones which recognize the vitality of our ongoing relational practices and ways of being. Ultimately, despite generations of social stigma and erasure, the Kirkness family narratives illuminate complex relational dynamics within Métis familial networks at the Red River Settlement, Red Deer Hill, SK, and Cookson, SK. I adopt a layered and relational reading approach, analyzing these texts alongside archival documents and other material to consider how our kinship practices and responsibilities adapt and persist despite longstanding rhetorics of erasure, dislocation, and division. Through these readings, the entries are made legible as sites of memory expressing Métis kinship writ large, with all the attendant continuities and contradictions, tensions and solidarities, which continue to make our communities so rich and dynamic.
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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 | 0.003 | 0.007 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.030 | 0.016 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.012 | 0.009 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.008 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.006 | 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".