“The Advent of Civilization Amongst Them Will\nNot Tend to Their Betterment”: Understanding\nRepresentations of Colonial Contact in the Kitikmeot
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Between 1915 and 1920, members of the Royal Northwest Mounted Police (RNWMP) wrote four major narratives of making contact with Inuit living in territory now known as the Kitikmeot region of Nunavut. The authors were the first representatives of the Canadian state to enter the region, and their narratives positioned Inuit as “better off without civilization.” Various members of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) stationed in the region over the subsequent three decades reproduced such discourse. While, at first glance, this discourse seems to attribute a nobility to traditional ways of life, upon closer inspection it actually positions Inuit as incapable of adapting successfully to changing socio-economic circumstances. Methodologically, this article critically reinterprets archival documents from the early agents of colonization in the Kitikmeot. While advancing historical scholarship concerning relations between Inuit and the Canadian state, the article contributes to contemporary agendas of decolonization and reconciliation by enabling a more complete understanding of the origins and nature of colonial rule in the Arctic. By arguing that colonial discourses have roots in local and specific relations of production, the article also contributes to postcolonial theories of efforts to legitimize colonization and represent colonized Others in essentialist and paternalistic terms. Résumé: Entre 1915 et 1920, des membres de la Royale Gendarmerie à cheval du Nord-Ouest (RGCNO) ont écrit quatre grands récits de prise de contact avec des Inuits vivant sur un territoire aujourd’hui connu sous le nom de région de Kitikmeot, au Nunavut. Les auteurs étaient les premiers représentants de l’État canadien à pénétrer dans la région, et leurs récits présentaient les Inuits comme « mieux lotis sans la civilisation ». Divers membres de la Gendarmerie royale du Canada (GRC) en poste dans la région durant les trois décennies suivantes ont répété ce discours. Si, à première vue, celui-ci semble attribuer une certaine noblesse aux modes de vie traditionnels, en y regardant de près, il présente en fait les Inuits comme incapables de s’adapter avec succès à l’évolution socioéconomique. Sur le plan méthodologique, l’article réinterprète de manière critique les documents d’archives des premiers agents de la colonisation dans le Kitikmeot. Tout en faisant progresser la recherche historique sur les relations entre les Inuits et l’État canadien, il contribue aux programmes contemporains de décolonisation et de réconciliation, car il permet de mieux comprendre les origines et la nature de la domination coloniale dans l’Arctique. En soutenant que les discours coloniaux ont des racines dans des relations de production locales et particulières, l’article contribue également aux théories postcoloniales sur les tentatives de légitimation de la colonisation et de représentation du colonisé en termes essentialistes et paternalistes.
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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 | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 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 teacher head, 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".