Reinventing First Nations Feminist Thought through Television: Mohawk Girls and Settler Colonialism in Canada
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In this presentation, I analyze the intersection of gender, Indigenous citizenship, and community formation as expressed in Mohawk filmmaker Tracy Deer’s 2014 sitcom, Mohawk Girls, thereby revealing the show’s Indigenous feminist critique of settler-colonialism and patriarchy. I read Mohawk Girls through the lens of federal Indian policy in order to bring to light that the roots of contemporary societal pressures and legal policing surrounding Mohawk women’s bodies at Kahnawá:ke lay in the settler-colonial objectives of installing patriarchy, dismantling Indigenous governments, and assimilating Indigenous communities. By merging cinematic analysis and a legal history of the Indian Act--the legislation which Mohawk scholar Audra Simpson identifies as having “made” and “unmade” Indians as a legal body in Canada--I reveal the ways in which Mohawk Girls specifically contests the political pressures experienced by Mohawk women as the reproducers of their First Nation. This analysis builds upon Indigenous feminist scholarship that identifies film as a means of confronting gender violence and trauma, highlights contemporary Indigenous women’s cinematic expressions of the 1876 Indian Act’s history and present manifestations, and showcases Indigenous feminist interventions to confront this violent past while forging a decolonized future. This paper is derived from my book manuscript, Reproducing Resistance: Gendered Violence and Indigenous Nationhood, and engages the themes of the 2022 Console-ing Passions Conference by exploring television as a space for reimagining popular depictions of Native women and by investigating media production as a means of reinventing a national dialogue around contemporary Indigenous feminist thought.
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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 | 0.001 | 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 | 0.038 | 0.021 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.012 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.006 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.005 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.007 | 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".