Story 2
The Other Kaszuby - Poland & Canada (Published by Country Connection Magazine)
We knew half of the story - of the Kashubs, Canada’s first Polish immigrants, who arrived 150 years ago this summer. We’d heard tales of how they carved farms and villages from the Ottawa Valley wilderness, one tree and one pumpkin-sized boulder at a time.
But where did these determined people come from, wondered my photographer husband, Jim, and what happened to the place they left in the more than a century during which Canada’s Kashubs lost all contact with their homeland?
From these musings a photographic quest was born and, in May, 2007 we drove the rural roads of Kaszuby, a distinct ethnic region near the Baltic Sea in northwest Poland to find where the story began. With cameras in hand we pondered the question - what evidence remains of a shared heritage with our Canadian Kashub friends?
Out of our explorations in the two Kashubys came Jim’s exhibition of silver gelatin black-and-white photographs Kashyby i Kaszuby - Reunited.
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Ruled variously by the Teutonic Knights, the Swedes, Germans, and Poles, the Kashubs (Kaszubi in Poland), a Slavic people who now number about a half million in their homeland, have never been masters of their own domain. From the 15th century to the 18th, they lived in relative peace as part of Poland, a country whose language resembled their own and whose people shared their deep Catholic faith. But by the mid-1800’s the Kashubs were chafing once again under a foreign ruler, this time the Prussian Otto von Bismark, who had almost succeeded in stamping out Kashub culture. Forbidden to speak their own language, restricted from practising their religion, and suffering a shortage of precious land, the Kashubs were a receptive audience to Canada’s alluring offer of 100 free acres to anyone who would farm its vast and empty wilderness. And so in 1858, 16 families sold all of their belongings and boarded a wooden sailing ship for a long voyage across the Atlantic.
“They say that where we come from in Poland looks a lot like here,” Canadian Kashubs will tell you. In truth, there is much resemblance - gentle hills, pine forests, lakes, sandy soil. But when 19th-century Kashubs heard the words, “100 acres” and “farms,” they surely never pictured the endless tangled forests, the forbidding rocks of the Canadian shield and the fierce blackflies that greeted them.
Once again their fate had been determined by political events far beyond their control. The government of Upper Canada was more concerned with opening up a new frontier far from the threat of American attack than with the quality of land they were assigning to these new settlers. It sent the Kashubs, each family armed with only an axe and a hoe, up the newly-surveyed Opeongo Line onto what should never have been considered farmland.
The Kashubs did what Kashubs have always done. They turned their backs to the outside world and made the best of their lot.
Over the next 30 years, dozens of immigrant Kashub families joined them. Together they cut down the giant trees and piled those rocks that could be moved at the edges of their new fields. They built the villages of Wilno, Barry’s Bay and Round Lake Centre and, in between, farms with log barns and stables gathered together against the wind. Beside the road they raised crosses and shrines like those at home and, in time, proud churches.
Then, all contact with the homeland ceased and over the years much knowledge of their cultural heritage was lost. “We knew the word Kashub,” says David Shulist, President of the Wilno Heritage Society, “but when our ancestors told their children about Stary Kraj, (the old country) they emphasized that they came from Poland, not the hated Prussia.” In 1998, Shulist gathered like-minded people and formed the Heritage Society to celebrate and strengthen Kashub culture.
Although many Kashubs now live in cities, somehow despite the isolation from their homeland, the few thousand who live around Wilno have managed to retain an identity and a way of life that even in the 21st century would look familiar to any of their ancestors - a rare example of longstanding cultural purity in multi-ethnic Canada. Family names are mostly Kashub and many still speak the language of their great-grandparents. Many still farm, their way, in small-scale family enterprises, and the tall-steepled churches are the centre of community life.
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Few people in Poland have any knowledge of their Canadian cousins. Hardly surprising. An immigrant people retain a collective memory, however dim, of their place of origin. But in the homeland, after a few generations, who remembers those who left?
But connections are slowly growing, largely due to the efforts of Shulist and Shirley Mask-Connolly, genealogical researcher and curator of the Polish Kashub Heritage Museum in Wilno. They invited Gdansk filmmaker Marian Gorlikowski (himself a Kashub) to Wilno’s May 2007 Kashub Day to produce a documentary for Polish television about Canada’s Kashubs. The Barry’s Bay parish of St. Hedwig’s has contributed funds for the restoration of one of their ancestral churches. When Shulist and his cousin, Ed Chippior, visited Kaszuby in 2007 to prepare for a tour the following spring of Canadian Kashubs to their homeland, they found themselves interviewed on radio and by newspaper reporters fascinated that a pair of Canadians could speak their language.
Still, in the villages Jim and I found that the word “Canada” had little effect on wary Kashubs. It was only when Jim produced his note, translated into Polish, “We would like to take photographs to show the Kashubs in Canada what Kaszuby looks like,” that the reserve thawed. This brought to mind the first time, more than 30 years ago, that we found ourselves in a Canadian Kashub kitchen: the obvious close scrutiny; my clear recollection of the very instant our acceptance was won.
This distrust of strangers is born of long years of sad reality. In the tiny village of Chocinski Mlyn, white-haired Maria told us how in the 40s German schoolteachers slapped the faces of children daring to speak Polish or Kaszubian - twice - scratching their cheeks with their rings on the second swipe. She showed us around her 400-year old miller’s cottage and told us how in 1946, as the Communists came to power, they smashed every mill wheel to assure control over the production of bread. So that was why, despite searching every village with Mlyn (mill) in its name, we’d found not a single remnant of a water wheel.
Canadian Kashubs‘ farms stand apart, their buildings distinctively different from typical rural Ontario style. Across the ocean, at the outdoor folk museum at Wdzydze Kiszewskie, one of Europe’s great collections of historical wood architecture, we saw where their forefathers learned how to build. Among structures gathered from across the region - thatch-roofed farmer’s cottages, a noble’s manor house, stodoly (stables), a fisherman’s cabin, a school - we found details so like those we’d seen on Wilno farms: the careful hand fitting-together of logs; the ladders climbing across steep roofs to reach chimneys; even the carved wooden door latches.
Nowhere is the Kashubs‘ facility with wood more apparent than in the churches like St. Martin’s in Borzyskowy. Its massive tamarack logs glow with the dark patina of the centuries but stand as stubbornly strong as they have since 1722 when they were hauled into place and notched into perfect kilter by axe-wielding Kashubs. What strength this soaring structure must have given 19th-century worshippers like Antoine and Veronica Piechowski before they bundled up their young family and boarded the creaky Barq Agda in 1872 for the perilous journey to Canada.
On May 3, 2008, the hills of Wilno echoed with the rhythm of yet another Kashub Day - of the dancing feet of great-grandchildren, the great-greats and the great-great-greats. On that August 1 weekend, the rhythm was even more insistent as the Wilno Heritage Society hosted official 150th anniversary celebrations of the birth of their community. Unmistakable in a folk costume embroidered with the flowers of a Kashubian meadow, Dave Shulist stands tall at all Kashub events.
And when he led 26 Canadian Kashubs back to Stary Kraj and into the old Borzyszkowy church, alongside the familiar religious rituals, those unyielding log walls presented yet another lesson: the moral of the Kashubs‘ very existence.
When the sturdy stand close together, they create a force that adversity cannot diminish.
Copyright©: Sharon Blomfield
