Feeding the Fire: Food and Reciprocity Among the Dene
Bibliographic record
Abstract
For the indigenous Dene of subarctic Canada, food is central to negotiating their relationships with family, animals, and the spirits of ancestors. Indigenous religions and environmental relationships are seldom discussed in terms of foodways, yet centering a discussion of Dene spirituality around the materiality and necessity of food grounds an understanding in the lived realities of Dene peoples. Dene understand animals to gift themselves as food to hunters, who in return demonstrate respect to the animal by sharing the meat within the human community and by offering meat to ancestors through ceremonies such as feeding the fire, thus maintaining social relationships with animals and ancestors through respectful reciprocity. Dene also demonstrate respect by following interspecies social conventions, protocols of respect particular to different beings which are followed by all those involved in the killing, distribution, cooking, and eating. This includes not just male hunters but also women so that animals will continue to give themselves to the people. In traditional Dene ontologies, respectful reciprocity through sharing food serves to maintain balanced and mutually beneficial relationships between social beings living in the same environment.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.005 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.007 | 0.003 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 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; both teacher heads agree on what is shown here.
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".