Extinct woolly dog hair in the fabric of B.C.’s history
Burke Museum’s blanket hints at Coast Salish life pre-Confederation
Dogged detective work — and a small tear — have led researchers to a remarkable discovery in a Coast Salish blanket that may have been woven around the time of Canadian Confederation 150 years ago.
The blanket, which is part of a collection at the Burke Museum in Seattle, was recently analyzed by researchers at the University of Victoria who found it contains rare woolly dog hair from an extinct breed of dog that was once kept by First Nations people for its hair.
The blanket is one of only a handful of objects in the world known to contain dog wool.
“It confirms and validates First Nations oral history,” said spinning and textiles expert Liz Hammond-Kaarremaa, a former Vancouver Island University professor who suspected the blanket may contain dog hair.
Coast Salish First Nations kept the small woolly dogs, which had thick, long hair, separated from hunting dogs in either corrals or on small islands, and used their hair in textiles, she said.
George Vancouver observed the woolly dogs near Seattle in 1792, writing that they were “all shorn as close to the skin as sheep” with hair that could be “lifted up by the corner without causing any separation.”
But while the dog’s existence has been well-established, it has been more difficult to prove its hair was used in blankets, Hammond-Kaarremaa said.
Seven blankets at the Smithsonian in Washington, D.C., had been tested and found to contain dog wool, but there were no known examples in B.C. or Washington.
Coast Salish territory included much of Vancouver Island and the Lower Mainland, stretching south through the Puget Sound down to Tillamook, Ore.
With the arrival of the Hudson’s Bay Company and cheaper, easily available sheep’s wool blankets, the woolly dogs were allowed to interbreed with other dog species and the species died out around the 1860s, Hammond-Kaarremaa said. There may have been some left on northern Vancouver Island up until 1900.
The retired professor was working on a research project for a master’s program in spinning last fall when she received a fellowship to study the Burke Museum’s blanket. A small tear allowed her to see the individual threads and she was able to identify sinew, likely from a deer or elk, and cedar fibres, but she also saw some kind of wool. It did not look like mountain goat.
“I wondered if it could be dog wool,” she said.
She suggested the blanket be tested, putting the museum in touch with Elaine Humphrey at UVic’s advanced microscopy facility.
To prove the hair in the blanket was from a woolly dog, Humphrey first needed a sample of woolly dog hair. She was able to track down a pelt that had been given to the Smithsonian after the dog was destroyed for killing a sheep. The hair was a match.
The blanket at the Burke Museum was at one time owned by James Wickersham, a collector who lived in Tacoma, Wash., and later in Alaska. After his death in 1939, his collection was sold to a store in Alaska before being donated to the Burke Museum in 1974.
The blanket will be an important resource to Coast Salish weavers, who study objects in museums in an effort to revive complex techniques and better understand the unique materials used in traditional textiles, said Kathryn BunnMarcuse, the Burke Museum’s curator of northwest native art.
“We look forward to sharing the blanket with weavers and other researchers,” Bunn-Marcuse said, “so that it can be reconnected to the indigenous knowledge systems from which it came.”
Humphrey said she was thrilled to be able to share her findings with dozens of First Nations weavers who attended a recent presentation at the museum.
“It’s very useful for the weavers and spinners today to give them an idea of what was done in the past,” Hammond-Kaarremaa said.