Author: Noor Al-Samarrai / Source: Atlas Obscura
At the Burke Museum in Seattle, Washington, there rests a white blanket with two reddish-brown stripes running down the sides. It’s more fuzzy than fluffy, and a gaping tear in the outer layer exposes the horizontal threads woven beneath.
Those threads are made of materials including hemp, linen, goat hair, and the hair of the Coast Salish wool dog, also known as the woolly dog, which has been extinct for over a century.Few objects survived the encroachment of settlers upon Coast Salish people—a group of related tribes native to an area ranging from the Puget Sound up to the middle of Vancouver Island in British Columbia—and their land, so remnants like this blanket are precious. “Something created by the hands of a weaver in your community … that’s an important kind of connection that goes far beyond what we can put in a museum catalog,” says Kathryn Bunn-Marcuse, a curator at the Burke Museum.
Lydia Sigo is a Suquamish tribal member and the curator and archivist at the Suquamish Museum. Suquamish, Washington, is seated across the Puget Sound from Seattle and just north of Bainbridge Island, where, Sigo says, woolly dogs were kept for over a thousand years.
Because their prized white hair was the product of a recessive trait, the dogs were kept on islands including Bainbridge and Tatoosh—a little thimble of rock jutting up from the sea at the westernmost tip of northern Washington just below Vancouver Island—so they would be isolated from hunting dogs and other canines in the village. The Coast Salish people fed them a bounty of dried salmon, which kept the canines glossy-coated over the winter months. Before the dogs were shorn with sharpened mussels, their fur was cleaned of dirt and debris with white clay or diatomaceous earth. Those hairs were turned into a fluffy, tangled mass, then spun into yarn together with fibers of…
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