The nation on the Catwalk: Traveling memories of belonging in the Miss Kiev Pageant in Winnipeg (1979–1984).

This article analyzes how ethnic, national, and diasporic belonging were negotiated through the Miss Kiev pageant in Winnipeg from 1979 to 1984, focusing on 27 contestant entry forms preserved in the Sylvia Todaschuk fonds. It demonstrates that young Ukrainian Canadian women performed Ukrainianness not only as cultural continuity but as a strategic mode of civic engagement within Canada’s multicultural framework, reflecting both inherited diasporic memory and adaptation to Canadian public life. The pageant functioned as a site where identity, morality, and heritage converged, revealing how Canadian multiculturalism was actively reinterpreted by ethnic communities amid political and institutional tensions within the Ukrainian Canadian diaspora. The study situates these performances within broader historical contexts, including Cold War politics and community divisions, highlighting the dynamic, localized, and generational processes through which diasporic memory and belonging were articulated and transformed.