Children and Childhood in Wendat Society, 1600-1700
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This dissertation examines Wendat childhood in the 17th century. Contrary to European expectations, Wendat child-rearing practices emphasized independence, empowerment, and respect for all individuals, encouraging children to pay attention to and contribute to the safety, health, and well-being of their families and community. As a result, I argue that children and youths took on essential and important roles in Wendat society, including teaching, diplomacy, and spiritual leadership, often in ways that were distinct from that of adults. Youths were often at the heart of Wendat-settler relations in those roles, and helped greet, teach, and support European newcomers. Children and youths helped teach newcomers to speak and act like a Wendat, served as intermediaries and translators between Wendat and non-Wendat leadership, and took on important political and spiritual roles to foster long-term friendships with French visitors. \n\tWendat children and youths were loved, respected, and treated as uniquely important contributors to Wendat society. Children were raised by the entire community, not just the biological parents, and everyone had a role in caring for the youth and preparing them for their life-long responsibilities to family and community. The care for children also extended to Wendat mortuary customs, as childrenespecially infantssometimes had unusual, age-determined burials. \n\tThis dissertation emphasizes a biographical case study approach, focusing on what the stories of individuals can tell us about the society as a whole. In looking for the stories of individuals, it is apparent that personhood and personal agency were important factors in how different individuals responded to the widespread changes in Wendat society in the wake of French arrival to the Great Lakes and St. Lawrence regions. This dissertation also takes an interdisciplinary and ethnohistorical approach, using archaeological, linguistic, and anthropological sources to complement the analysis of historical documents. \n\tChildren often fulfilled roles that were different from, and inappropriate for, adults, and their roles were often complimentary to those of child-bearing adults and Elders. For a more complete understanding of 17th century Wendat society, this dissertation argues age must be considered as an important category of analysis.
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 | 0.001 | 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 | 0.009 | 0.004 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.004 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 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".