Barry's Bay Book Talk: Creating Kashubia

St. Hedwig Roman Catholic Church, 35 Karol Wojtyla Square, Barry's Bay, Ontario K0J 1B0
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Our Lady Seat of Wisdom Academy is hosting a book talk with Joshua C. Blank, author of Creating Kashubia: History, Memory and Identity in Canada's First Polish Community on Tuesday, March 14 at 7:30pm in St. Hedwig Roman Catholic Church.

This event is free, and everyone from the community and the academy is invited to attend.

“Blank’s work is thorough and his approach is multidisciplinary. His conclusions reach beyond the experience of Poles in Canada and have application for the entire Polish diaspora as well as other ethnic groups.” Anna D. Jaroszynska-Kirchmann, Eastern Connecticut State University

Creating Kashubia

History, Memory, and Identity in Canada's First Polish Community

A groundbreaking work that looks at the changing ways in which Canada’s first Polish community views itself.

In 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. Read more>