Literacy, identity and protest : the Khoi of South Africa and the Ojibwa of Upper Canada c1820-1850
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Historical treatments of the indigenous experience in the nineteenth-century British Empire have often failed to appreciate the role of literacy and of missionary patrons of literacy, and in particular their role in community formation and empowerment. This analysis of literacy among the Khoi of South Africa and the Ojibwa of Upper Canada between 1820 and 1850 focuses on the Khoi who formed the Kat River Settlement in 1829, and the Ojibwa Mississauga who reclaimed their Credit River reserve in 1825. It tracks the role of missionaries and Bible literacy in community formation and in indigenous political activism until the Kat River Rebellion in 1850 and the abandonment of the Credit River village in 1848. The comparison draws on theories of literacy and nationalism to challenge post-colonial perspectives that have undermined the agency of indigenous peoples and missionaries in political protest. This analysis of literacy among the Khoi and Ojibwa recognises the importance of both literacy skills and literacy social practices in the formation of community identity, community mobilisation, and protest. It shows that literacy was not only a means of social control for missionaries, colonial authorities and white colonists, but a source of empowerment for indigenous elites who ascribed their own meaning to literacy for their community-building enterprises. For their part, missionaries aided nationality formation both by using Christianity and literacy symbols to encourage group cohesion and by supporting the development of written vernacular languages. Literacy social practices established the church as a political and governing institution among the Khoi as well as reflected the community's efforts to embrace European civilisation, a pre-condition for their entitlement to own land. The Mississauga, whose political institutions were intact, relied on their literacy and writing ability more explicitly to strengthen the power of the chiefs and to generate income and secure territorial interests.
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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 | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.019 | 0.009 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.004 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| 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".