Daffodils and Dispossession: Nikkei Settlers, White Possession, and Settler Colonial Property in Bradner, BC, 1914–51
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This article focuses on the forced sales of property, namely daffodil bulbs and farms, owned by Nikkei farmers before 1943 in the rural community of Bradner, British Columbia, known as the “daffodil capital” of Canada. By centring the microhistorical workings of property dispossession in one local context, it connects fields commonly treated as distinct – settler colonialism and Japanese Canadian history – to reveal how settler colonial property logics and practices were employed by the state and ordinary settlers to secure white possession. Drawing primarily on state records, I trace how the federal government dispossessed four Nikkei daffodil-farming families in the 1940s by using contradictory, uneven, and contested rationales and strategies. More specifically, I identify three property characteristics – definition, value, and boundaries – that the state manipulated to reconfigure Nikkei property for white ownership. In doing so, I denaturalize common narratives of property as stable and argue that the dispossession was not an anomalous moment of state racism, as has been largely understood, but a project that renewed a regime founded on the elision of Indigenous sovereignty and the construction of white settler property. By highlighting the state’s lies, both big and small, this article demonstrates the fundamental fictions of the settler property regime in British Columbia. These were fictions that Nikkei settlers were both invested in and were betrayed by in the 1940s.
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 distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.005 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 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 teacher head, 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".