The Myth of the Homesteader: Challenging Saskatchewan Settler Narratives, 1880-1910
Bibliographic record
Abstract
At the beginning of Saskatchewan’s homesteading period, from 1880 to 1910, the Homesteading Hero Myth – a narrative that celebrates the courageous white farmer who entered an unknown landscape and faced numerous hardships, only to succeed in breaking the land and creating home – took shape. The Homesteading Hero Myth presents agricultural development of Saskatchewan land as an epic quest and casts settlers as the winsome protagonists who prevail despite the challenges they face. This same Myth downplays or ignores the roles of Indigenous peoples who are represented neither as main nor as supporting characters: when they are given a role to play at all, it is minor, on the sidelines, typecast, or silent. Yet, despite the Homesteading Hero Myth relying on the idea of the Canadian prairies being an “open” landscape ripe for the settlers’ taking, the settlers who came did not actually see the land as empty. Settlers recognized evidence that Indigenous peoples had recently occupied the territory they now claimed, and in many cases recognized Indigenous peoples as neighbours. Settler family narratives about the homesteading period provide an alternate account in which incoming settlers recognized and understood that they were arriving on Indigenous lands. Ultimately, this thesis argues that homesteader hero narratives need to be “unsettled” and reframed into the uncomfortable reality that they are really stories about imperial dispossession, suppression, and oppression of 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 | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.029 | 0.016 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.007 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| 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".