Always a Part of the Land: Settler Colonialism, Indigenous Histories, and the Commemoration of National Historic Sites, 1919- 2019
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This thesis critically examines the commemorative activities of the Historic Sites and Monuments Board of Canada (HSMBC) from its creation in 1919 to its centennial celebrations in 2019. The HSMBC provides recommendations to the federal government regarding the designation of national historic sites, people, and events as being ‘nationally significant’ through commemorative plaques erected across the country. This thesis demonstrates how the HSMBC and both amateur and professional historians involved in its work have advanced the ongoing processes of settler colonialism by supporting the intellectual displacement of Indigenous histories through commemorative practices and through the public discourses associated with these. It further argues how definitions of ‘national significance’ have been actively constructed throughout the twentieth and twenty-first centuries to advance the objectives of the federal government and, more generally, colonial society.\nUsing Ontario as a case study, this thesis articulates how intellectual trends associated with Indigenous peoples have impacted the interpretation of Indigenous histories by the federal government, showcasing how individual historians on the HSMBC influenced these interpretations based on their lived experiences. The work of the HSMBC was never passively accepted by Indigenous peoples who not only challenged the narratives that were being presented as ‘nationally significant’ but also contested the central premises of commemoration within Western society. This was reflected through examples of Indigenous peoples supporting the commemoration of cultural landscapes, reinterpreting archaeological sites to show cultural and societal continuity, asserting the significance of oral histories as a method of conveying historical information, and decentralizing the importance of specific dates to recognize cyclical patterns as being meaningful within their communities. These interventions have not only reformed the work of the HSMBC and the realities of Canada’s commemorative landscape, but have also contested the principles of settler colonialism that have actively sought to erase the histories of Indigenous peoples.
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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) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.026 | 0.028 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.007 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| 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".