Talkin' Back to Johnny Mac: Interrupting John A. Macdonald & Learning to Curate from an Indigenous Framework
Bibliographic record
Abstract
From January to April 2015, I curated Talkin’ Back to Johnny Mac, a five-part performance series that took place in Katarokwi (Kingston, Ontario). The series, which took place during the bicentennial birthday year of Kingstonian Prime Minister Sir John A. Macdonald, interrupted the celebratory, nationalist, and settler colonial narratives that drove the celebration and critiqued the ways in which historical and colonial/settler icons like Macdonald are remembered. Each individual performance by artists David Garneau, Peter Morin, Adrian Stimson, Leah Decter, and Tanya Lukin Linkater embodied unacknowledged contradictions in the celebratory tone of Macdonald’s birthday year. Together, the performances built a critical dialogue that intervened in the colonial narrative that turned Macdonald into an icon. Taken together, this series of performative acts forced a consideration of his ongoing influence as the first Prime Minister of Canada on the undercurrent of discrimination and assimilation still so fundamental to state approaches to Indigenous issues in Canada. \nTalkin’ Back to Johnny Mac is the first component of this project-based dissertation. Documentation of the performances that constituted the project is included in Chapter Three. The second component is this written section, which explores Indigenous curatorial methodologies by placing my experience of curating Talkin’ Back in conversation with the practices of six Indigenous curators. In so doing, I create a map of Indigenous curatorial history in Canada. The written component builds on the curatorial project, locating it within a discussion of Indigenous curating as a practice based in Indigenous epistemologies and ontologies.
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 distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.025 | 0.003 |
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; both teacher heads agree on what is shown here.
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".