Kai Colorado
I analyzed a corpus consisting of three sets of council transcriptions from meetings between Native American tribes, Europeans, and Euro-Americans. In Mallet, I generated fifteen (15) topics across the corpus of 292 documents. On the first iteration of the process, I attempted to generate ten (10) topics, but the weight each topic was the same. The majority of the 15 discernable topics were pertinent to the relations between parties or the organization of such. For example, the topic that I labeled “Boundaries” included the words “treaty, line, lands, boundary, river, etc.” The distinctions between indigenous topics and Eurocentric topics are also visible across the key terms. The category “European Officials” houses words such as, “general,
commissioners, agent, government” and other words associated with Eurocentric standards of national organization. On the contrary the topic “Native Nations” has names of tribes (Cherokee, Mississippi, Choctaw) and displays indigenous patterns of organization that contrast the European titles and jurisdictions. By examining the occurrence of topics across the corpus, patterns in negotiations and speakers can be seen. Topics that consist of mainly European language or large mentions of organizational or divisive legislation can be seen as times in which negotiations were controlled by European representatives. Insights in topics such as this can be used to monitor the levels of indigenous and European input across negotiations. The focus of discussions is also apparent when viewing the topic breakdowns. Documents discussing land distribution and settlements are mainly of the “Boundaries” and “Exchange” topics due to discussions of ordinances and treaty lines. Viewing topic weight across documents in combination with analysis of speakers in each instance allows the reader to determine the true exchange of ideas across parties and the weight of each speaker’s contributions to the negotiation.