A Syndemic Perspective of the Canadian Residential School Experience
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This thesis explores the extent to which syndemic theory can apply to the residential school experience and inform the ongoing archaeological work to locate the missing children and unmarked burials of former schools. Utilizing a theory-based approach that is primarily situated within the critical-interpretive theoretical foundation and the syndemic paradigm in medical anthropology, this thesis aims to shed light on the complex interacting biosocial conditions that contributed to high rates of infectivity and death within the Canadian residential school system. Factors such as overcrowding, malnutrition, unsanitary living conditions, humiliation, and physical and sexual abuse compounded to create the ideal conditions for infectious disease spread and exacerbated the ongoing Indigenous health crisis in Canada. The high student death rate and poor administrative record keeping meant that a number of former students were buried in unmarked and neglected cemeteries on former school grounds. Efforts to locate the missing children and unmarked burials of residential schools, spearheaded by a number of Indigenous communities and Canadian archaeologists, is an important aspect of reconciliation and healing. This work illustrates the importance of using a multidisciplinary approach to addressing reconciliation efforts, drawing on public survivor testimonies to identify evidence of syndemics to then begin to move archaeological research past concepts of comorbidity and emphasize the inherent connection, and consequences, of multiple adverse biosocial interactions.
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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 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.005 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.048 | 0.035 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.010 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.009 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.007 | 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".