Indigenous Blood Memory and Abstraction in the work of Anishinaabe Artist Rebecca Belmore
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Anishinaabe artist Rebecca Belmore responds to globalizationthrough artistic methods that include longstanding Indigenous traditionsand conceptual frameworks. In this article I focus on the entwinedaesthetics of abstraction and blood memory in her works. Generally,cultural studies scholars have considered globalization through patternsof abstraction, or making-autonomous elements previously embedded ina specific context. These thinkers emphasize processes of innovation andchange as fundamental tenets of abstraction, culturally and aesthetically.Eschewing this framework, Belmore’s framings of abstraction centerIndigenous knowledge –what I am calling blood memory (MITHLO,2011; BENESIINAABANDAN, 2013; LINKLATER, 2013)—in orderto uncover the aesthetic foundations of modern abstraction in Indigenousthought. Abstraction has been a continuous and principal element ofIndigenous aesthetics in North America for many thousands of years(PHILLIPS and BERLO, 1998).
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
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 | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.019 | 0.017 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.007 | 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".