Point, counterpoint between Western and Coast Salish knowledge at play in new book on the woolly dog

Snuneymuxw author and artist Eliot Kwulasultun White-Hill is hopeful that Liz Hammond-Kaarremaa’s The Teachings of Mutton: A Coast Salish Woolly Dog, a book to which he contributed, will open the door to “holding up” Indigenous knowledge with western academic and scientific research.

“For me, that's one of the most exciting things: Celebrating both the Indigenous knowledge and Indigenous ways of knowing along with the academic and scientific research … (It’s) not nearly often enough Indigenous knowledge is looked about that way. It’s really a transformative work,” said White-Hill.

“Mutton” is the name that American ethnologist George Gibbs, who travelled through the Pacific Northwest in the 1840s and 1850s, gave his pet woolly dog. Mutton’s pelt is the only known pelt of a Coast Salish Woolly Dog, whose numbers were in decline by the 1860s. There are no reports of woolly dogs after the 1940s. Mutton’s pelt was stored in a drawer at the Smithsonian Museum, in Washington, for 150 years before an amateur archivist found it. Non-Indigenous researcher and writer Hammond-Kaarremaa viewed it for the first time in 2012.

The Coast Salish peoples had no access to mountain goats in the low-lying areas along the Salish Sea and on Vancouver Island and so bred the woolly dog for thousands of years for its soft, white, woolly fibres which were woven into blankets, textiles and regalia.

But the woolly dog went well beyond that according to Coast Salish stories chronicled in the book.

Hammond-Kaarremaa worked with an advisory committee of Coast Salish weavers, knowledge keepers and Elders to guide research into the woolly dog as well as to interview Coast Salish peoples on stories and memories of the woolly dog. The initial research was published in 2023 in Science, an academic journal, and served as the precursor to The Teachings of Mutton, which hit the bookstores earlier in May.

As Hammond-Kaarremaa writes in the introduction of her book, “This indicates not only that academic journals are now encouraging Indigenous Knowledge, co-authors and contributors to their articles, but also how scientists (and other disciplines) are looking for ways to do that.”

What is also important about the content of this book, says White-Hill, is that Coast Salish oral history has the opportunity to run counterpoint to written Western history.

“I know in my contributions, I certainly critique the colonial narrative,” he said. “We need to look critically at these things, about what we're told. I really hope that that is an impact as well for people to understand that we really have to look critically at the history books and look at who was writing and from what perspective and for who are they writing.”

Woolly dogs were at the centre of social, cultural and economic systems of the Coast Salish, says White-Hill. Woolly dog blankets served as a symbol of wealth, a form of currency and as an expression of art and culture. Woolly dogs were considered sacred.

For these very reasons, White-Hill calls the colonial explanation that the Coast Salish peoples simply replaced woolly dogs once they got access to sheep “total nonsense.”

He points to the impact of numerous smallpox epidemics in the Pacific Northwest where nine out of 10 people died.

“There would have been so many different aspects of our culture that were just totally erased through that single event…and that had a huge impact on the woolly dogs going extinct. Because when you can't even look after yourself, how can you look after the animals and the pets that you have? And the ongoing impacts of colonization and colonialism…everything that the Canadian government did…all of these just really ugly, intentional acts that were meant to kill our culture,” said White-Hill.

In fact, White-Hill says it wasn’t until he purposefully started asking knowledge keepers and Elders about woolly dogs that he started hearing the stories. He notes that he doesn’t come from a family of weavers.

“I didn't learn about the woolly dogs until after my late great grandmother passed away. And she was such an incredible knowledge keeper and just knew so much. And so I really wish that I would have had the chance to ask her. I'm sure she would have told me,” he said.

In The Teachings of Mutton, Hammond-Kaarremaa painstakingly provides written observations by explorers and scholars and then, in many cases, refutes their beliefs and findings with new information determined from Mutton’s pelt and Indigenous oral history.

She also lays out the unique techniques and tools used to both gather the fur from the woolly dog and for weaving it. Hammond-Kaarremaa herself is a master spinner.

“Mutton’s pelt has acted like a teacher. His teachings have revealed so much, to so many people…about the enduring strength of Oral History,” writes Hammond-Kaarremaa.

“The big thing about this is that we haven't forgotten the woolly dog and that the woolly dog is part of cultural reclamation for us as Coast Salish people. (We are) reclaiming our stories, reclaiming who we are and reclaiming the narrative,” said White-Hill, who is confident this reclamation will continue as “it's a renaissance of Indigenous art and culture in Canada right now.”

White-Hill is taking his knowledge of the woolly dog further, with a completed written and illustrated draft of a children’s storybook about the woolly dog. He is also in the process of curating an exhibit about Salish woolly dogs at the Field Museum in Chicago, which holds a significant collection of Coast Salish cultural belongings, including blankets made from woolly dog hair and baskets from Washington State that have woolly dog representation on them. The exhibit opens next year.

The Science journal submission that led to the book has also led to a documentary which will be released this fall.

The Teachings of Mutton: A Coast Salish Woolly Dog is published by Harbour Publishing and can be purchased at harbourpublishing.com/products/

Local Journalism Initiative Reporters are supported by a financial contribution made by the Government of Canada.