Review of Royally Wronged: The Royal Society of Canada and Indigenous Peoples, by Constance Backhouse, et al., eds, and It Was Dark There All the Time: Sophia Burthen and the Legacy of Slavery in Canada, by Andrew Hunter
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Reframing history as constructed by white people is a challenge met in these notable books.Both directly address the construction of knowledge itself as the ground of racial injustice, and the writers try hard to avoid committing new offences of their own in their necessarily proprietary roles as scholars working from within academic frames of reference.Royally Wronged answers a 2017 call for papers by the Royal Society of Canada's Truth and Reconciliation Task Force.The Task Force requested studies addressing the Society's and Canadian scholars' historical complicity in producing "disastrous interactions" (6) between white settlers and Indigenous Peoples.Some of the fourteen interdisciplinary essays in the volume focus on the origins of the RSC and the influence of Duncan Campbell Scott, long-time Society member and president from 1921-1932, and creator of ignominious policies governing Canadian residential schools; others consider how the RSC has shaped Canadian scholarship in general.Indigenous and non-Indigenous contributors speak from a range of disciplinary perspectives including history, law, anthropology, archaeology, political science, education, social sciences, and literature.They assess the role of the RSC in perpetuating rather than challenging academic mindsets that fostered limited and limiting views of Indigenous reality, experience, and knowledge.Constance Backhouse and Carole Gerson in their opening arguments establish the scope of the volume and emphasize the odd trajectory of Scott's career.Groomed by the Society for each of the positions he eventually held within it, he was promoted through its ranks based primarily on personality and social connections, despite his mediocrity as a poet and scholar.Outshone especially in the early years by more accomplished academics and writers comprising the majority of RSC membership, Scott nevertheless gradually garnered immense power in the organization that, in turn, enhanced his status as the "principal architect" of Indigenous policy.Like many of his colleagues who saw themselves as supporters of Indigenous people, Scott espoused racialized conceptions of them ranging from condescendingly appreciative to openly unsympathetic.Backhouse and others contend that Scott's obliviousness to systemic racism cannot be excused as simply the common ignorance of his era.Shedding fascinating light on his conscious rejection of views opposing his own is Gerson's account of Scott's grudging preoccupation with the works of celebrated Mohawk poet Pauline Johnson.By analyzing their works in tandem over time, Gerson reveals how Scott both appropriated and repudiated Johnson's perspectives in an ongoing, implied dialogue of which Johnson herself remained unaware.Further evidence of how Scott's and other RSC members' publications perpetuated the
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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 | 0.007 | 0.033 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.008 | 0.012 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.005 | 0.012 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.008 | 0.007 |
| Open science | 0.004 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.006 | 0.006 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.011 | 0.004 |
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".