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Contribution short abstract:

In my speech, I will refer to Baltic Coast and Pina regions and process of colonisation lands and native inhabitants for national sake in the Second Republic of Poland (interwar period).

Contribution long abstract:

In my speech, I will refer to the issue of internal colonization in the Second Polish Republic.

The establishment of the new Polish state (1918) brought a number of questions - among them the obvious question about "true national identity", but also the question about the "native landscape": the landscape and environment that could be considered a representation of Polishness.

Keeping a broad perspective, I would like to talk about two cases: the Baltic Sea, which was not part of the national imagination in the 19th century (nation-formation period), but due to geopolitical change small fragment of the coast became the subject of intensive infrastructural work in the interwar decades. Part of this project was the inclusion of the Kashubians, the indigenous inhabitants of the coastal areas, into the national community and their absolute Polonization as well as exploiting the sea and at the same time making it "our sea", completely and eternally Polish.

The second case I want to discuss is Polesie, an area located in today's Belarus. In the interwar period, the swamps around the Pina river were inhabited by indigenous people with an identity they defined as "local", who generally spoke Belarusian and practiced deeply ecological river management. I would like to talk about the way in which this region was presented in state narratives and popular culture narratives: as requiring civilization, drying and polonization.

In both cases, I will refer to state policies, journalism and literary texts that built popular imagination of that time.