In 1828 a woven blanket from the Pacific coast of North America entered the collection of the University of Helsinki. It later passed to the National Museum of Finland, and it stayed there, catalogued as VK-1, for close to two centuries. In August 2017, staff at the Museum of Anthropology at UBC opened its shipping crate for a condition report, with Musqueam weaver Debra Sparrow in the room. As far as the museum knows, she was the first Salish community member to see the blanket in almost 200 years.
That moment sits at the end of a long story. A Salish blanket was never only a warm covering. It was made from rare fibre, it marked the standing of the people who wore and gave it, and its making was nearly cut off by the policies of the 19th and 20th centuries. This account follows that story in order, using museum records, a 2023 genetic study and the words of weavers themselves.
Mountain-goat wool, woolly dogs and what went into a blanket
The materials were the first mark of value. According to the authors of a study published in Science in December 2023, Coast Salish weavers blended dog wool with mountain-goat wool, waterfowl down and plant fibres such as fireweed and cattail fluff. The finished blankets, the study says, were prestigious cultural belongings.
Mountain-goat wool had to be hunted for. Sue Rowley, a curator at the Museum of Anthropology, described in 2020 the sense of family work behind each piece: hunters going out together for goats, others gathering dye plants, others spinning. The dog wool came from closer to home.
Coast Salish peoples kept several kinds of dogs, the study explains: hunting dogs, village dogs and a long-haired breed with a thick undercoat that was shorn for weaving. That breed has names in several Coast Salish languages, among them sqwemá:y and sqwǝméy̓. Its coat combined soft guard hairs with an unusually long, crimped undercoat that spun easily into warm yarn.
Debra Sparrow's grandfather, Ed Sparrow, put the value plainly. As she recalled it for the researchers, he told her "every village had [woolly dogs], that they were like gold because they were mixed with the mountain goat and then rove and spun."
How the woolly dogs were kept, including at Nanaimo
Keeping a breed apart takes effort, and the study describes how it was done. Women who owned the dogs managed their breeding closely, isolating them on islands or in pens so they would not mix with hunting or village dogs. The dogs were, in the authors' words, "a form of wealth and status for Coast Salish women."
One of the examples the paper gives is local. It names a village on Cameron Island in Nanaimo, in Snuneymuxw territory, as sqwiqwmi', translated as "Little Dog", and offers it as a case of island names that reflect the connection with dogs. If you know Cameron Island by its English name, that is the place the study means.
The tradition was old. Remains of dogs with a distinct build in Coast Salish territories suggest woolly dog husbandry was practised for about 5,000 years before European colonization, the study reports, and oral histories say the dogs were part of Coast Salish society for millennia.
Skokomish/Twana Elder Michael Pavel told the researchers an origin account in which the dogs "were given the gift of the wool, and they were able to teach the women how to gather the wool, how to process the wool, how to spin the wool, and how to weave with the wool."
Mutton, the last pelt
The genetic part of the story rests on a single animal. A dog called Mutton belonged to George Gibbs, a naturalist and ethnographer with the Northwest Boundary Survey of 1857 to 1862. Mutton fell ill and died in late 1859, and his pelt and lower leg bones went to the Smithsonian Institution. It is the only known pelt of a Coast Salish woolly dog.
The 2023 team, which included researchers from the Smithsonian, Vancouver Island University in Nanaimo and Coast Salish weavers and Knowledge Keepers, sequenced Mutton's genome. They estimated his ancestry at 84 per cent from dogs that lived in the Americas before colonization and 16 per cent European, even though he was born after settlers had brought their own dogs. The authors read that as a sign of careful breeding by Coast Salish women to keep the line intact.
The study also settled an older argument. The first comprehensive book on Salish weaving had questioned whether any museum blanket contained mainly dog wool, and whether the fibre could be spun at all. Later protein analysis of 19th-century blankets, cited in the paper, confirmed that dog wool was used.
Blankets, the potlatch and standing
What made a blanket more than cloth was how it was used. The Canadian Museum of History, introducing its exhibition on Coast Salish blankets, calls them a symbol of purification, endowed with spiritual powers, with an important role in ceremonial exchanges. The 2023 study adds that wearing a ceremonial blanket was spiritually transformative, because it joined the weaver, the wearer and the community.
The exchanges happened above all at the potlatch. The Canadian Encyclopedia's entry on the Coast Salish says potlatches served to distribute wealth, to confer status and rank on individuals, kin groups and clans, and to establish claims to names and rights. Its separate entry on the potlatch lists blankets among the valuable goods that high-ranking hosts accumulated, sometimes over years, and then gave to guests.
That is the sense in which these were blankets of high standing. Their value came from rare fibre, from the months of work in each one and from the public moment when they were given and witnessed.
The potlatch ban and the decline of dog-wool weaving
The federal government moved to stop that moment. According to the Canadian Encyclopedia, an amendment to the Indian Act was passed on April 19, 1884, and took effect on January 1, 1885, making it a misdemeanour to take part in a potlatch. The encyclopedia's two entries date the ban slightly differently, one from 1884 and one from 1885, which reflects the gap between passage and effect. The ban ended with the revision of the Indian Act in 1951.
Enforcement was uneven. British Columbia's chief justice, Matthew Begbie, ruled the early law unenforceable because it did not define a potlatch; the law was later rewritten and prosecutions increased.
For the woolly dogs, the study argues that the usual explanation, that cheap trade blankets made home weaving pointless, is too simple. It points instead to compounding pressures: the arrival of more than 33,000 miners in the 1858 Fraser River gold rush, epidemics, an estimated two-thirds fall in Indigenous population between 1830 and 1882, laws such as the Indian Act of 1876 that restricted Indigenous women, and later residential schooling that removed children from their families.
Stó:lō Elder Rena Point Bolton, 95 in 2022, described what that meant for one family. Her great-grandmother had kept woolly dogs. "They were told they couldn't do their cultural things. There was the police, the Indian Agent and the priests. The dogs were not allowed. She had to get rid of the dogs."
She also described what survived. Weavers were barred from their traditional spindle whorls and looms, she said, and the looms were burned or given away to museums and collectors. "There [were] just a few people who went underground. And my grandmother and my mother were two of them."
A loom from Saanich and a blanket back from Finland
The revival that followed has been led by weavers, with museums in a supporting role. At the Museum of Anthropology, a large loom made in the early 1900s for Mrs. Bartleman, a weaver from the W̱SÁNEĆ First Nation, had stood in the galleries since 2010. It is more than 10 feet long and about five feet high.
For the exhibition The Fabric of Our Land: Salish Weaving, which ran from November 2017 to April 2018, the museum had the loom fitted so it could be used again. Debra Sparrow spun the wool, warped it and wove in the gallery, talking with visitors as she worked. The Finnish blanket was on loan in the same show, and she made her new piece as an homage to it.
So many visitors stopped to talk that she could not finish during the exhibition. The loom was moved to a hallway and she kept going. On August 15, more than a dozen members of the Bartleman family gathered to see the finished blanket come off the loom, and two of them, Cecilia Grant and Charles Elliot, released it. It is now in the museum's collection.
Weavers today
Contemporary weaving is a revival rather than an unbroken copy of the past, and the weavers say so themselves. The museum describes Debra Sparrow as self-taught in Salish design and weaving and as part of the revival of Musqueam weaving for more than 30 years. Speaking to Rowley in 2020, she said a six-foot blanket now takes her two to three months, and that she would like to try a finer piece using "stinging nettle and mountain goat, dog hair."
She described the long silence directly. "I like to say our blankets were dormant, lying sleeping, but they're awake now."
Snuneymuxw voices appear in the same research. Artist Eliot Kwulasultun White-Hill (Snuneymuxw) told the 2023 study team that the history of the dogs challenges an outdated picture: "Our relationship with the woolly dogs, our relationship with the camas patches and the clam beds, the way that we tended the land and tended the forests… these all show the systems in place that are far more complex than what people take for granted about Coast Salish culture."
For readers in Nanaimo, the nearest place to look is the Nanaimo Museum, whose Snuneymuxw gallery shows stone carvings, spindle whorls and Coast Salish regalia alongside oral traditions recorded with Snuneymuxw Elders in the 1990s. Those are the lands where Snuneymuxw workers dug Nanaimo's first coal for the Hudson's Bay Company in 1852, and the Snuneymuxw First Nation describes entering the Sarlequun Snuneymuxw Treaty on December 23, 1854. A century later, between 1942 and 1952, federal researchers studied hunger among First Nations children at six residential schools, Alberni among them.
One question the genetics could not answer is what the woolly dogs looked like across the whole coast. The study notes that Nuu-chah-nulth peoples on western Vancouver Island kept a different wool dog, reportedly larger and in colours from brown and spotted to black, grey and white. Whether those were separate breeds or one varied population traded along the coast, a single pelt from 1859 cannot say.
Questions
What is a Salish blanket made of?
Historic Coast Salish blankets used wool from mountain goats and from a long-haired breed of dog kept for its coat. The 2023 Science study on woolly dogs lists waterfowl down and plant fibres such as fireweed and cattail fluff among the other materials blended in.
What was a Coast Salish woolly dog?
It was a breed kept separate from hunting and village dogs and shorn for its thick, crimped undercoat. Coast Salish languages have several names for it, among them sqwemá:y and sqwǝméy̓, according to the authors of the 2023 study.
Are woolly dogs extinct?
Yes. The population was lost during the 19th century, and the only known pelt is that of a dog named Mutton, who died in 1859 and whose remains are held at the Smithsonian Institution.
How old is the woolly dog tradition?
Zooarchaeological remains point to roughly 5,000 years of woolly dog husbandry in Coast Salish territories before European colonization, according to the Science paper. Coast Salish oral histories also place the dogs in their societies for millennia.
Was there a woolly dog connection to Nanaimo?
The study names a village on Cameron Island in Nanaimo, in Snuneymuxw territory, as sqwiqwmi', which it translates as 'Little Dog'. The authors give it as an example of island names that reflect the practice of keeping the dogs apart on islands.
Why were Coast Salish blankets linked to status?
Woven blankets were prestige belongings, and the dogs that supplied the wool were themselves a form of wealth and status for the women who kept them. Blankets also moved through the potlatch, the ceremony that the Canadian Encyclopedia describes as conferring status and rank on individuals and families.
Did the potlatch ban affect weaving?
The ban outlawed the main ceremony in which blankets were given and witnessed, from 1885 until the Indian Act was revised in 1951. Stó:lō Elder Rena Point Bolton told researchers that looms were taken and burned and that her grandmother and mother were among the few who kept weaving in secret.
Why did woolly dogs disappear?
The older explanation blamed cheap trade blankets from British and American companies. The 2023 study argues that this oversimplifies the story and points to epidemics, the 1858 gold rush, colonial laws aimed at Indigenous women and, later, residential schools.
Where can I see a historic Salish blanket?
Very few early patterned Salish weavings survive, and most are in museums far from Salish territory, according to the Museum of Anthropology at UBC. The Canadian Museum of History has presented Coast Salish blankets as an exhibition, and the Nanaimo Museum shows Coast Salish regalia in its Snuneymuxw gallery.
Who is reviving Salish weaving today?
Musqueam weaver Debra Sparrow is one of the best-known figures; the Museum of Anthropology describes her as involved in the revival of Musqueam weaving for more than 30 years. Her sisters Robyn and Wendy are also named by the museum in connection with weaving projects there.
How long does it take to weave a blanket by hand?
Debra Sparrow told the Museum of Anthropology in 2020 that a six-foot blanket takes her two to three months. She said that made her wonder how earlier weavers managed it with hand-gathered and hand-spun fibre.
Sources
- The history of Coast Salish 'woolly dogs' revealed by ancient genomics and Indigenous Knowledge, Audrey T. Lin et al., Science 382 (6676), 1303–1308 (author manuscript in PubMed Central), 2023-12-15
- New Weaving, Old Loom: A Family Loom Brought to Life, Museum of Anthropology at UBC, 2020-06-12
- In Conversation: Sue Rowley Speaks with Debra Sparrow, Museum of Anthropology at UBC, 2020-06-12
- Coast Salish Blankets (exhibition), Canadian Museum of History
- Coast Salish, Dorothy Kennedy and Randy Bouchard, The Canadian Encyclopedia, 2019-07-25
- Potlatch, René R. Gadacz, The Canadian Encyclopedia, 2024-06-07
- Potlatch Ban, Taylor C. Noakes, The Canadian Encyclopedia, 2024-01-11
- Snuneymuxw First Nation, Snuneymuxw First Nation
- The Snuneymuxw (permanent exhibit), Nanaimo Museum
