The Nêhiyawak Nation through Âcimowina: Experiencing Plains Cree Knowledge through Oral Narratives
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Nêhiyawîhcikêwin, Plains Cree Culture, is an oral culture that shares their wisdom, insights, teachings, and warnings through the voices of the elders to the generations that will one day fill their place. Oral narratives have been used by the Nehiyawak nation for hundreds and if not thousands of years, and for particular interest we will focus on âcimowina, oral narratives of a time after Wîsahêcâhk, Elder Brother, but also touch on aspects of âtayôhkêwina, sacred stories that account how the world was shaped, when animals and humans could talk, and when Wîsahêcâhk transformed the world. This paper begins with the importance of oral narratives to various Indigenous peoples around the world as it presents the cultural value and ontological foundations of this intellectual tradition and Indigenous methodology. From there I will discuss Nêhiyawak âcimowina that gives insight into a living past and not a written history, as I present primary sources found in Winona Wheeler’s ‘Cree Intellectual Traditions in History,’ and Neal McLeod’s Cree Narrative Memory: From Treaties to Contemporary Times. As a Plains Cree woman myself, I aim to explore how in depth the cultural protocols of Cree âcimowina are and how oral narratives offer lessons and teachings from a Plains Cree perspective, and I thank Winona Wheeler and Neal McLeod for taking the time to learn and share there insights, and the numerous elders and ancestors that guided, talked, and walked with them as they put forward these pieces. Though I am unable to present every facet of acîmowina, this paper aims to reveal a world outside our conceived realities through Western education and dominant discourse, as we witness the Plains Cree world through Plains Cree voices.
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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 | 0.003 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.017 | 0.018 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.011 | 0.011 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.008 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 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".