Laura Ishiguro

This thesis examines the intimate relationship forged between the traditional British festival May Day, the celebration’s main figure the May Queen, and white settler society in New Westminster between the event’s earliest beginnings in 1858 and the end of the interwar years in 1939. In doing so, this thesis argues that the advent and ongoing celebration of May Day in the city was part of a larger project of collective aspiration—what scholars term settler futurity—that fundamentally defined settler colonialism in British Columbia, and elsewhere, from the mid-nineteenth century onwards. The May Queen, performed in these years through the body of a white settler girl between the ages of ten and sixteen, served as the ultimate symbol of this futurity and a powerful community figure around which gendered and racialized notions of collective identity, civic loyalty and belonging took shape. In this, the annual embodied performance of the May Queen – supported by her Maids of Honour and the Honour Guard of white settler boys – functioned as a crucial means of investing children with the gendered behavioural expectations and responsibilities necessary to represent and uphold the cisheteronormative patriarchal logics of settler colonialism that would ensure the longevity of a stable white settler future in the city. This examination of May Day and the May Queens of New Westminster, then, reveals the critical role that white settler children, in particular white settler girls, played as politicized subjects in the construction and maintenance of local colonial power and settler society in British Columbia from the mid-nineteenth century onwards.

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This thesis focuses on the forced sales of property, namely daffodils, daffodil bulbs, and bulb farms, owned by Nikkei farmers before 1943 in the small rural community of Bradner in British Columbia’s Fraser Valley. It draws on fields commonly treated as distinct, settler colonial studies and Japanese Canadian (Nikkei) history, by focusing on the workings of property and property dispossession in local perspective. Tracing how the state, specifically the federal Office of the Custodian of Enemy Property and the Veterans’ Land Act Administration, dispossessed four Nikkei families, this thesis analyzes the uneven rationales of settler state policy and practice. Using three property characteristics – definition, value, and boundaries – as they applied to daffodil farms, it examines how the state manipulated the parameters of reasonable governance to reconfigure Nikkei property for white ownership in the 1940s. In doing so, it argues that the dispossession was not an isolated moment of state racism, but a project that renewed a private property regime in settler colonial Bradner (and British Columbia more broadly). This was a regime predicated on the erasure of Indigenous sovereignty and the privileging of whiteness. By highlighting the microhistorical mechanisms of dispossession, this thesis reveals further how ordinary white settlers, predominantly British and Dutch bulb-growers, were entangled in the forced sales and, importantly, how Nikkei people contested the state’s inconsistent logics and practices. Nikkei farmers in the Fraser Valley recognized the contradictions of the dispossession process and testified to the state’s betrayals throughout the decade. At these sites of contestation, the experiences of four relatively unknown Nikkei families mired in state violence suggest that their commitment to the settler colonial property regime was not an inevitability.

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Chinese migrant workers in North America have typically been regarded in two ways by historians: either as competitive threats to white workers, or as workers isolated within ethnic niches. Few scholars have examined cases where Chinese workers complemented or supported the labour of others. This thesis looks at Chinese labour in British Columbia’s salmon canning industry between 1871 and 1941, arguing that Chinese workers were foundational to white fishing jobs in the province. Drawing on company records, Government reports, newspapers, and oral interviews, I examine Chinese manual labour, labour politics, and wages as three areas where Chinese workers upheld the labour of fishers in a nominally “white” industry. As such, this thesis offers a different outlook on the structural entanglement of race and labour in British Columbia in the seventy years after the province joined the Canadian Confederation.

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