Creating Kashubia by Joshua C. Blank PAPERBACK 9780773547209

Creating KashubiaHistory, Memory, and Identity in Canada's First Polish Community\nAuthor(s): Joshua C. Blank\nFormat: Paperback\nPublisher: McGill-Queen's University Press, Canada\nImprint: McGill-Queen's University Press\nISBN-13: 9780773547209, 978-0773547209\nSynopsis\nIn recent years, over one million Canadians have claimed Polish heritage - a significant population increase since the first group of Poles came from Prussian-occupied Poland and settled in Wilno, Ontario, west of Ottawa in 1858. For over a century, descendants from this community thought of themselves as Polish, but this began to change in the 1980s due to the work of a descendant priest who emphasized the community's origins in Poland's Kashubia region. What resulted was the reinvention of ethnicity concurrent with a similar movement in northern Poland. Creating Kashubia chronicles more than one hundred and fifty years of history, identity, and memory and challenges the historiography of migration and settlement .