Speaking Truth to Historiography: The Power of Dramaturgy in Making Relationships Between Indigenous and Settler Peoples
Bibliographic record
Abstract
AbstractHistory and historiography only exist one to the other, but their relationship is not an obvious one. The factors that influence how we know what occurred in the past are a conglomeration of interpretations constructed from a selection of chosen elements orchestrated with particular intent. As a process of creation, organization, narration, design, research, and analysis, dramaturgy has a seminal role to play in the relationship between history and historiography. Manufacturing historical knowledge is the work of the historian but the making of it is an act of dramaturgy, a process through which history becomes historiography. As Canadian historiographies continue to fall into question under the weight and urgency of the revelations and fabrications exposed in The Truth and Reconciliation Report, the protestations and challenges in and around Canada150, and artistic manifestations that re-story our shared pasts, the myth of a benevolent Canada has fallen apart and so too has the relationship between Indigenous and non-Indigenous peoples. Many would argue that it was never together. False historiographies have caused profound damage to Indigenous peoples as well as to settler Canadians who have perpetrated or inherited the reigns of injustice. Dismantling false historiographies in exchange for a plurality of truthful ones is work that can be redressed with dramaturgies that are both old and new. In this study I offer examples of how different and varied dramaturgical approaches to politics and performance are changing how we know history. By studying performative interventions such as the appearance of the Bawating Protectors on Parliament Hill during the Sesquicentennial celebrations, and theatrical productions such as the 1967 and 2017 versions of the opera Louis Riel, as well as the contemporary opera Missing, I chart the dramaturgical processes which influence what we know about history by changing the conditions of how we know. As a Canadian of settler descent and a professional in the live arts for more than forty years, I bring my experience as a dramaturg to fields of performance and political action to explore how together they can effect change in the future relationship between Indigenous and non-Indigenous peoples.
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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 | 0.010 | 0.014 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.018 | 0.054 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.014 | 0.008 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.008 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.008 | 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".