Review of <i>The Piikani Blackfeet: A Culture Under Siege</i> By John C. Jackson
Bibliographic record
Abstract
As a member of the Amskapi Pikuni, or Blackfeet Tribe of Montana, I did not begin serious study of my tribe until 1983, when I returned home. Harvard educated and knowledgeable of the world, I turned my early ventures in learning about the tribe after years of separation into a rewarding obsession. Beginning with John Ewers's The Blackfeet: Raiders on the Northwestern Plains (1958), I quickly decided to make a serious effort to acquire knowledge of the tribe and within a few years had reviewed most of the standard, and sometimes obscure, texts and identified redundant pieces. Subsequent study became more focused, with emphasis on the oral tradition and our relative tribes in Canada. I became a scholar of my tribal language until it became my primary endeavor. One of the common questions one often hears asked is the correct usage of the term Blackfeet versus Blackfoot. Another concerns the correct names of the affiliated tribes of the Blackfoot Confederacy. When I began John Jackson's The Piikani Blackfeet: A Culture Under Siege, it was with some trepidation since in the oral tradition Piikani Blackfeet is a marriage of old and new nomenclature not used by members of the tribe. In the tribal language it is simply Piikani (Apatohzi ki Amskapo-North and South), and in English Blackfeet. Blackfoot refers to the tribal confederacy in general. Blackfeet is exclusively used for the tribe in Montana. After sorting out the title, and being satisfied despite its combining form, I read on. I could have used Jackson's book when I started. Loaded with history, it gives attention to the language as well (a feature sadly lacking in most texts), and-despite an occasional editorial-sounding observation-offers a valid analysis. Students of the tribe will gain much from reading it. In fact, members of the Blackfeet tribe, long denied access to information about themselves, would do well to use it as a starting point from which to alleviate the dearth of knowledge among the younger generations of their heritage.
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 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 | 0.011 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.005 | 0.007 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.004 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 0.002 |
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".