Ceding critical authority: responsible White-Settler Readings of Indigenous literature in Canada
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Since the Indigenous civil rights movement began nationally organizing in the 1960s, Indigenous literature has earned increasing prominence in Canadian universities and the cultural mainstream. However, this prominence is tempered by white-settler reading practices that seek to defuse the socio-political commentary of the Indigenous civil rights movement that is infused into much of Indigenous literature. To this end, white-settler students and academics have learned to focus on tropes of separation between Indigenous and non-Indigenous communities, the edification of white-settler readers, and affective rather than active responses —particularly to endemic tragedy — in Indigenous texts. Such readings allow white-settler readers to consume Indigenous literature according to comfortable, expected patterns that do not challenge the probity, validity, or sovereignty of contemporary Canada. These reading practices have filtered out of university settings and into the cultural mainstream where they have become the framework for modern reconciliation-politics in Canada. This paper looks to the works of Thomas King and Eden Robinson as exemplary Indigenous writers whose work is assessed according to these white-settler reading tropes while systematically, stylistically, and structurally resisting them. Conversely, Joseph Boyden’s work and career exemplify the popularity available to (Indigenous) writers who embrace these tropes. The contrasts and similarities between these authors illustrate the critical landscape that has formed around Indigenous literature as a popular genre. Moreover, reading these texts for their socio-political content suggests why and how white settler reading practice must change
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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 | 0.004 | 0.010 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.004 | 0.004 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.073 | 0.036 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.018 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.003 | 0.007 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.006 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 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".