Set in Stone? Conflict and Compromise in Orillia, Ontario
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The past decade has seen an international wave of public debate regarding monuments and commemorative practices, as societies attempt to come to terms with histories of colonialism, slavery, and white supremacy. In Orillia, Ontario, controversy has proliferated around a monument to Samuel de Champlain, erected in 1925 to commemorate “the advent of the white race into Ontario,” and seen by many as offensive to Indigenous peoples and people of colour generally. In 2017 the monument was removed for refurbishing, and the Samuel de Champlain Monument Working Group (SCMWG) was struck to consider options for its potential remediation, in the spirit of Canada’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC). Up to the present, the process has yet to yield definitive results. Based on archival research, newspaper reporting, and two participant interviews, this study examines the SCMWG process as it has unfolded in the community and seeks to evaluate its effectiveness in addressing the problematic aspects of the monument. My conclusions are two-fold. First, I find that the discourse surrounding the process skewed towards a minimalist understanding of the monument’s embedded symbolic meanings, and as such failed to engage with a robust understanding of its problematic messaging. Second, I find the twin goals of honouring the TRC and representing popular public opinion to conflict with one another, to the detriment of the former. Overall, while based in a good faith intention, the SCMWG thus far has proven a missed opportunity to engage meaningfully with the project of “reconciliation” with Indigenous peoples.
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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 | 0.003 | 0.008 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.059 | 0.021 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.009 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.003 | 0.008 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.008 | 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".