« A very settler colonial pandemic: Nigel Mantou Lou, KimberlyNoels, Ying Shan, DorisZhang, Shachi Kurl, ‘Ethnic minority, immigrants, and Indigenous people’s well-being disparities in Canada during the COVID-19 pandemic: The mediating role of threat perceptions’, International Journal of Intercultural Relations, 2022
Nonterritorial decolonisation? European Non-Territorial Autonomy Network, ‘Can non-territorial autonomy enhance indigenous peoples’ right to self-determination?’, Entan Policy Paper, 5, 2022 »

Celebrations of settler futurity: Georgia Rose Twiss, ‘Hail to the Queen of the May!’: settler futurity, childhood, and the May Queens of New Westminster, 1858-1939, MA dissertation, University of British Columbia, 2022

26Apr22

Abstract: 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.


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