Locating the Political and Spiritual in Three Plays by Métis/Dene Playwright Marie Clements: the Unnatural and Accidental Women, Copper Thunderbird, and Tombs of the Vanishing Indian
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This work examines the dramaturgical relationship between the political and spiritual layers of three of Marie Clements’ plays: the Unnatural and Accidental Women, Copper Thunderbird, and Tombs of the Vanishing Indian. I introduce the playwright and the three plays, my relationship to the plays, Clements’s craft and Indigenous dramaturgy, Indigenous spirituality as it pertains to the play, and my political approach, which includes Marxist-influenced feminist materialism. I then separate the three plays into the spiritual and political narratives for a close and individual reading of each. I argue that by bringing the spirit world directly onstage and weaving together both traditional and material worlds, Clements provides her characters with a timeless connection to the wisdom of ancestors and history with which to confront the consequences of colonialism and settler capitalism on their lives. In doing so, she alleviates her characters’ isolation and dislocation, allowing them (and the audience) to transcend their circumstances and (re) imagine an Indigenous futurity.
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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) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.017 | 0.018 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.006 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 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".