Persistence works! And 16 journals later!

And all I wanted to do was to get an article published....

The article in question is:

Rock Paintings in the “Wilderness” – “Savaged and Shared” Anthropos International Review of Anthropology and Linguistics 2025 (1) 157 - 182 https://doi.org/10.5771/0257-9774-2025-1-157

It contains the results of the main body of research I worked on, on pictographs, in the Lake of the Woods for my PhD at McGill University, with the late Bruce Trigger, who was my PhD supervisor. I defended my PhD, six weeks before he passed (I went to his funeral.)

Now to publish an article so many years later, as it’s now 2025, I admit is odd. Ok, this history of trying to get this 2025 article published is long (and very messy), so I'll be brief. I knew that I was trying to publish something where the results are 'negative' or don't support the existing, i.e. accepted, interpretation which is never easy. Bruce had told me many times that people, especially researchers don’t like change…but i’d never expected what happened, to happen. I knew that I was trying to publish something where the results are 'negative' or don't support the existing, i.e. accepted, interpretation which is never easy. I knew, as he said it, that people (ie researchers) wouldn't be happy. I'd just not realised just how much and to what efforts many people would go….

I starting submitting the article for publication in a large number of journal submission systems, some time ago (I mean years). I always emailed the Editors of these journals beforehand to ask their advice about whether the article's topic was suitable as it covers several disciplines and I knew the results weren't conventional, as Bruce Trigger, often told me.

Sometimes, the article was:

(a) it was probably (I'm guessing here) rejected as I had no reply at all from the journal editors. an appropriate venue. Why not reply? Who knows. I have asked myself why people don't reply if they're editors of academic journals. Write back to say no. Don't just say nothing.

(b) Some journal editors replied to me to tell me that I wasn't my PhD supervisor’s PhD student and I was lying about who I was, who I had studied with for my PhD. The irony is that I'd never met any of them or spoken/contacted them before having emailed to ask about the article. It was weird. I had never introduced myself as I'm Bruce's former PhD student. Why would I?

(c) Some journal editors, after I'd submitted the article and it had gone through the peer review system told me that the reviewers' comments were vitriolic, spiteful and they didn't wish to send them to me. I always was told to consider approaching another journal. One editor even went far to say that they really liked it (I'm covering up information here) but the reviewers comments were awful and really nasty.

Grim. Odd and weird. I suspect that it's connected to behaviour which I started experiencing not long after I'd defended my PhD thesis, but before I'd graduated and submitted my final manuscript of my PhD (with examiners comments).

Not long after I defended my PhD, I’d not even graduated or even finished doing the examiners’ comments, I had started to receive emails from researchers – all of from North America, but predominately Canada. These people were a mixture of fully tenured professors, researchers on short contracts, PhD students and postdocs or people I knew looking for postdocs. A few I'd met, some I knew of, but many I didn't or had never met.

These emails were horrible – and were what I'd described as vitriolic and hate filled emails (some even wrote that I should be dead).

Well, I have sought legal counsel. I think that these people are deeply insecure and felt threatened. Why I don’t know. I’ve done nothing to them, but the problem appears that I exist and did some doctoral research supervised by Bruce Trigger. What’s bizarre is that these some of these people are teaching students and doing research! A few people, who I knew had just qualified with PhDs (from some prestigious universities globally) but had at least finished wrote to tell me that I wasn't allowed to 'write' anything or express an opinion in print. They wrote that I “wasn't allowed to write anything as I wasn't a member of the Elect”. I replied (even though I know now that I should have just deleted their emails) that “I wasn't a Calvinist and I was going to continue writing as they had no authority in trying to get me to stop expressing myself”.

Every nasty email has been deleted on advice of legal counsel. Names will not be mentioned. My view is that I think that people should just concentrate their minds on their own work. I suspect that this behaviour was caused by someone or a group of people. I've some hunches as you might expect based on other discoveries.

I found out that my academic paperwork from my time as a doctoral student at McGill, longer exists – I asked for an investigation in May 2017. Technically it should be in the university vaults, but it's 'gone'. Hmm, so was it shredded? Was I that awful that my existence of having attended the university as a PhD student to be denied? I'd have to say that I was never able to get hold of the references that my PhD supervisor, left on his desk – this was the last thing he told me, when I saw him in the reception after my PhD defence on September 13^th, 2006. It was six weeks before he passed away of cancer.

I suspect that there's some people who is telling some tall tales and I think, from some text that I saw written about my 'career' from written by an academic on Twitter (now X) in November 2020, that this is a good assumption.

I knew throughout the time that I studied for a PhD at McGill, that two of my PhD supervisors' PhD students who were ahead of me in the programme were not very happy that I was doing a PhD at McGill. Both were very blunt about it.

Honestly, after my PhD supervisor died, six weeks after I defended my PhD, all hell broke loose. All I can say is that I'd never recommend McGill as a place to do anything, especially if you're a woman.

Now the odd thing is that I had another study, a much smaller one which I had done for my PhD, where I applied the same methodology that I'd developed for the images of the pictograph sites, to the images but on birchbark scrolls, published in 2019. Why? Both created by shamans but these were on birchbark scrolls, not the vertical surfaces of granite. So the difference is the physical context…as its the same group of Indigenous peoples - the Algonquians. It was much easier to get published. Clearly those vitriolic reviewers of the newly published article have a different mind from those who reviewed the article in 2019. The irony was that I used the same methodology….

Colson, Alicia J. M. ‘An Instruction Manual Would Be Perfect’. Anthropos: International Review of Anthropology and Linguistics 114, no. 1 (January 2019): 37–56. https://doi.org/10.5771/0257-9774-2019-1-37.

So, to cut a long story short, persistence does pay off!

(Both articles are behind paywalls…so if you want to read them, let me know.).