Living Through Extinction: The Métis Buffalo Hunting Memoir
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Today, L’espace de Louis Goulet and The Last Buffalo Hunter are primarily understood as historical documents, and both works are valued by scholars for their ability to convey facts about late-nineteenth century Métis life. In contrast to this approach, this thesis offers an aesthetic analysis of these works, one that considers the passage of these narratives from the oral tradition to the written form, along with their formal, thematic, rhetorical, and descriptive devices. Through this mode of analysis, this reading argues that these works use the medium of storytelling in order to grapple with the conflicts and contradictions that arose within the buffalo hunting Métis community due to the role that these hunters played in the extinction of the buffalo. L’espace de Louis Goulet calls our attention towards the Métis oral tradition in order to reflect the author’s own immersion into, as well as his eventual disconnection from, the prairie landscape. Ultimately, Goulet’s narrative is concerned with questions of how one survives and what one survives as within a milieu that one’s own actions have devastated. The Last Buffalo Hunter evokes the tradition of Western autobiography in order to subvert the expected narrative of self-formation through economic activity in favour of a narrative that intertwines economic growth and communal sustenance with environmental decline and communal dissipation. Both narratives conclude with their narrators going blind and bankrupt, and the thesis ends on a consideration of this subject position in relation to anthropogenic extinction events.
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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 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.015 | 0.011 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.007 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 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".