NW Native Art • The Reading Shelf • Guide 5 of 8

Guide, Week 5. The Dog That Wore the Mountain

Start with this week’s Reading before diving into this Guide.

Three ways to use this guide. If you are in a live class, read before seminar and bring the questions with you. If you are working around a missed class, write your responses to the thinking questions and you have done the week. If you are fully self-guided, take the questions at your own pace.

Key terms

Two-bar loom: the Salish loom, its warp wound continuously around two rollers, woven entirely by hand.
Spindle whorl: the carved flywheel disc. Its imagery revolved before the spinner as she worked.
Woolly dog: the distinct dog lineage bred for fleece across roughly five millennia, kept apart from village dogs, sheared like sheep. It was extinct by the early twentieth century under colonial disruption.
Mutton: the dog who died in 1859 and whose Smithsonian pelt anchored the 2023 Science genome study, co-authored with Coast Salish weavers and elders.
Blanket economy: robes as visible wealth, given at namings and potlatches, distributed to witnesses. Prices on the coast came to be quoted in blankets.
Robes of protection: the weavers’ own published framing, that a robe carries the wearer through the exposed passages of a life.
The revival: Musqueam (Debra and Robyn Sparrow, mid-1980s) and Squamish (Janice George and Buddy Joseph, from 2003, 2,500+ students taught).
Cowichan sweater: the distinct post-contact knitted tradition, with its own appropriation fight (2010 Olympics).

Thinking questions

A society bred and maintained a dog for five thousand years to supply an art form. Name the longest-running piece of “art infrastructure” your own community maintains. What would its extinction take with it beyond the product?
The woolly dog study put elders and weavers on the author line of a Science paper. What actually changes when knowledge-keepers are co-authors rather than informants? Follow the money, the credit, and the control.
Weaving skipped roughly two generations at Musqueam and returned through museum pieces and one book. What does that say about the real function of museums and documentation, for better and worse? Who was the documentation for, and who did it end up serving?
The blanket was simultaneously currency, regalia, and protection. Modern life splits those functions into money, fashion, and insurance. What was gained and lost in the splitting?
HBC sold Cowichan-styled sweaters at the 2010 Olympics. Cowichan Tribes pushed back and won concessions. Sketch the line between inspiration and appropriation as this course has developed it. Where exactly did HBC cross it?

If you carry Coast Salish heritage

[CO-AUTHOR block. The teaching programs at Squamish and Musqueam may welcome students; the co-author knows the doors.]

Sources for deeper reading

Salish Blankets [AMAZON LINK], Working with Wool [AMAZON LINK], the 2023 Science paper, and Gustafson’s Salish Weaving for the documentation that carried the thread.