The Pedagogy of the Sasquatch: Imagining the Aboriginal without Feathers in Eden Robinson’s Monkey Beach
Bibliographic record
Abstract
[Abstract] This paper analyzes Canada’s foundational myths of Nature and Natives vis-à-vis recent negotiations of that same relationship by Aboriginal writers, and will offer a reading of Eden Robinson’s novel Monkey Beach (2000) as paradigmatic of those changes. This novel, I will argue, exposes the contradictions of a colonial discourse that has produced visions of the natural/native space as void of meaning, as claustrophobic, and as filled with unknown threats (the famous “garrison mentality”). By focusing on the culture-specific figure of the Sasquatch, Robinson’s text incorporates and analyzes those colonial notions side by side Aboriginal beliefs of the mythic and the supernatural. In the process, new meanings of nature and aboriginality will come about that contest those previously thought of as traditional or representative of the national ethos. At the same, I will try to show how the novel manages to avoid the common practices of stereotyping and/or essentializing aboriginality.
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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 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.022 | 0.030 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.006 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.005 |
| 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".