The record • Weaving
The loom stands at the north window because north light does not lie.
It is a two-bar loom, two horizontal rollers in an upright frame with the warp wound continuously around both, and it is the same machine Salish weavers have used for as long as anyone can measure. Beside it hangs a spindle, and on the spindle a carved wooden whorl. Some of the finest Coast Salish carving that survives from the old centuries lives on spindle whorls, made to spin before the eyes of a working woman. That fact alone rearranges most people’s idea of what art is for.
The dog
Ask anyone in this shed about the loom and eventually they will tell you about the dog, because it is the best story we have. For thousands of years, Coast Salish households bred and kept a small white dog for its wool. The dogs were kept apart so the coat stayed true, penned in some villages and on islands in others, fed the best food, tended by high-born women whose standing traveled with their flocks. Their hair was plucked in season or cut with a sharpened shell, spun with mountain goat wool and plant fiber, and woven into the blankets that were this coast’s highest wealth.
That is not folklore talking. In 2023 the journal Science published the genome of Mutton, the only woolly dog whose fleece survives, held at the Smithsonian since 1859. The study was co-authored by Coast Salish weavers and elders, and it found a distinct lineage thousands of years deep, bred deliberately for wool, still 85 percent precolonial in ancestry at the end (Lin et al., 2023; Smithsonian Institution, 2025). It also settled how the dogs died out. Not obsolescence. Colonial disruption, the same laws and pressures that burned looms and banned the gatherings the blankets existed for. Grand Chief Steven Point of the Stó:lō said it without decoration, that the woolly dog was simply a victim of colonialism.
The blanket
A woven robe on the shoulders was wealth made visible, currency at the great givings, and protection through the exposed passages of a life. That last phrasing belongs to the weavers themselves, the Squamish teachers Chepximiya Siyam, Chief Janice George, and Skwetsimeltxw Willard Joseph, whose book on Salish blankets is on our shelf and should be on yours (Tepper, George & Joseph, 2017). What blankets do in ceremony is not this page’s subject, and the shelf’s seventh reading explains why the sentence ends there.
The comeback
Weaving went quiet for most of a century. At Musqueam it returned in the 1980s through Debra Sparrow and her sisters, working backward from museum blankets. At Squamish, Janice George and Buddy Joseph learned in 2003 and have since taught thousands. Blankets stand openly at gatherings again. The loom in our window is one small downstream ripple of those teachers, and if you want the full story, the Reading Shelf’s fifth reading carries it, dog and all.
[CO-AUTHOR: any living programs or teachers appropriate to point to directly.]
References
Lin, A. T., Hammond-Kaarremaa, L., et al. (2023). The history of Coast Salish “woolly dogs” revealed by ancient genomics and Indigenous Knowledge. Science, 382(6676), 1303-1308. https://doi.org/10.1126/science.adi6549
Smithsonian Institution. (2025). The lost woolly dog (Sidedoor, Season 10, Episode 21) [Podcast transcript]. https://www.si.edu/sites/default/files/sidedoor/the_lost_woolly_dog_-_s10_ep21.pdf
Tepper, L. H., George, J. (Chepximiya Siyam), & Joseph, W. (2017). Salish blankets: Robes of protection and transformation, symbols of wealth. University of Nebraska Press. [AMAZON LINK]