Demythologizing the Mennonite peacemaker myth among serial-settler Mennonites
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This thesis examines how the “peacemaker myth”, which claims that Mennonite settlers brought spiritual and material prosperity to Indigenous communities, remains a form of settler-colonial denial in Paraguay today. While Mennonite settlers continue to claim that they peacefully coexist with Enlhet and Enxet peoples, their actions result in displacement, subjugation, and environmental destruction. Mennonites left Canada in the 1920s to resist forced assimilation, yet began imposing their own cultural and religious values upon Indigenous communities in Paraguay as soon as they arrived. The hypocrisy of the Mennonites who left Canada, preserving their autonomy while using their powers to deny the same to Indigenous peoples in Paraguay, is an exercise in settler-colonial impunity: importing lessons of domination learned in one settler setting into another subsequent settler setting. Highlighting Indigenous protests, this thesis argues that such resistance dismantles the peacemaker myth by revealing the ongoing effects of Mennonite-led environmental destruction, economic dependency, and cultural erasure in Paraguay. By situating Mennonite expansion within the broader discursive framework of the Doctrine of Discovery (see Miller 2019), I trace a pattern of Mennonite “moves to innocence” (Mawhinney 1998) that shapes Indigenous-settler relations in Latin America to this day.
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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 | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 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".