Review of <i>Aboriginal People and Colonizers of WesternCanada to 1900</i> By Sarah Carter
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This critical survey of Western Canadian history seeks to set the record straight. Sarah Carter takes issue with prevalent versions, much of which she sees as distorted because of inadequate or suppressed information, as well as from biases and misconceptions. As she points out, in some cases there have been actual misrepresentations: the accounts of explorer Samuel Hearne (1745-92), who reached the Arctic Ocean overland, and artist Paul Kane (1810- 71), who recorded Plains Indian life in his paintings while keeping a diary, were altered by publishers with an eye to sales. A consistent underestimation of the role of Indians in the fur trade and during the time of treaty-signing can be traced to a pervasive racial stereotyping. In countering these and other failings, Carter does not confine herself to pointing them out; she also provides alternative interpretations, particularly where she has new information. While this approach makes for a more richly textured history than has been standard fare for the Canadian West in the past, its limitation lies in Carter's being as much a historian of her time as those she criticizes. For one thing, she tends to idealize Indian societies, a reflection of the mood of our times. She also slips up on details, referring, for example, to the disappearance of the buffalo herds as the "extermination of the buffalo," and analyzing the effects of "the extermination of the species" on Amerindian societies. That the disappearance of the herds was not the equivalent to the disappearance of the species is confirmed by the thriving animals in national parks. As for the proclaimed Aboriginal social principle of "respectful relationships among equal parties," this has been by no means universally honored. The largest Stone Age empire the world has known was that of the Inca of Peru, and it was highly centralized, even to the use of language. In North America, social structures ranged from those of the hierarchical Natchez and peoples of the Northwest Coast to those of the various branches of the egalitarian Cree. Although it is easy to argue with Carter's goal of creating a definitive history for Western Canada, she has still enlarged and enlivened the popular view. As is the rule with history in general, however, the revisions will never end, as there will always be new questions, not to mention new information.
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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 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.013 | 0.024 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.011 | 0.006 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.008 | 0.001 |
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".