Continued Presence: The Art and Activism of Christi Belcourt and Chelsea Kaiah
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Māori scholar Linda Tuhiwai Smith argues for the need for decolonized research in her groundbreaking book <em>Decolonizing Methodologies</em> (2021). As Smith details, decolonized research is the decentering of colonial thinking and the recentering of Indigenous voices and perspective. In this thesis, I consider <em>decolonization</em>, as defined by Smith, in relation to contemporary Indigenous art and to a legacy of colonial practices in the U.S. and Canada. These colonial practices include the residential school system, the governmental injustices concerning Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women, Girls, and Two-Spirit Peoples (MMIWG2S), and the violation of treaties between Indigenous nation leaders and settler leaders to exploit the resources of the land. Drawing from Smith’s third edition of <em>Decolonizing Methodologies</em>, I explore how two contemporary Indigenous women artists, Christi Belcourt (Métis) and Chelsea Kaiah (Ute and Apache/Irish settler), like many contemporary artists, work with ancestral art forms, ancestral knowledge, and activism today to heal themselves, their communities, and future generations from colonial trauma. I position this as an assertion of continued Indigenous presence. I connect each artist to an Indigenous project, as articulated by Smith in <em>Decolonizing Methodologies</em>, to explain the different forms of activism and assertion of Indigenous presence. I do this to ground this thesis in Smith’s text, applying her suggested research approaches, to demonstrate different forms of Indigenous activism and action.
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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 | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.006 | 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".