Genocide in the Garden: Landscape Change, Botanical Colonization, and Ecological Alienation in Western Canadian Residential Schools, 1880s-1920s
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The landscapes of Canada’s Indian Residential Schools were not neutral: they reflected the ideals, aspirations, and histories of the Church and Government officials who oversaw their creation. This thesis explores the settler-colonial belief that values were embedded in the visual form of the landscape, and that as such, residential school gardens and grounds were considered active tools in the over-arching aims of Canada’s residential school system and national “Indian Policy” more broadly. It argues that far from being simply an accessory or afterthought, school gardens were in fact a central pillar of the project of cultural assimilation that undergirded the school system. The schools’ landscapes embodied in microcosm the anticipated transformation of the West’s natural ecosystems into production-oriented agricultural spaces, a process which itself represented the attempted elimination of the Indigenous cultures that existed in deep relationship to those ecosystems. Using textual analysis of residential school records and visual analysis of photographs and picture postcards, this thesis explores the symbolism implanted in three schools in Canada’s Northwest in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. This includes the Methodist-run Industrial School in Brandon, Manitoba, which displayed British-derived landscape garden ideals, the Roman Catholic Industrial School in Lebret (Qu’Appelle), Saskatchewan, a more formal French-colonial-styled garden in a celebrated valley location, and the Anglican Mission Boarding School in Hay River, Northwest Territories, a remote garden with less emphasis on aesthetics but no less symbolic significance. This thesis argues that despite the differing cultural and ecological realities which shaped them, the gardens and grounds at all three schools can ultimately be interpreted as sites of botanical colonization and cultural genocide through ecological alienation. This thesis’ use of the term botanical colonization recognizes the extent to which control of plants has been central to settler-colonial structures including Canada’s residential school system. Through the additional framing of ecological alienation, it highlights how forced physical separation from and transformation of the natural places central to Indigenous cultures is a direct form of identity alienation, a process which characterized the residential school experience.
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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 | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.005 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.015 | 0.015 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.004 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| 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".