Curly haired ‘woolly dogs’ of the Pacific Northwest were no myth

This article is so perfect in blending science and the voices of Indigenous people,” says archaeologist Julie Stein, former director of the Burke Museum of Natural History and Culture. “It’s really impressive.” Like the Sto:lo, many Coast Salish groups in the Pacific Northwest have oral traditions recollecting dogs whose coiled undercoats were spun into fibers and woven into elaborately patterned blankets. “All those communities had stories that they raised a dog specifically for its wool,” says Liz Hammond-Kaarremaa, a co-author of the new research and historian at Vancouver Island University. The dogs vanished in the late 19th century, when a gold rush brought tens of thousands of European settlers to the region. Early European ethnographers thought the Coast Salish were exclusively hunter-gatherers who had not domesticated any animals, including dogs. They guessed the canines were instead relatively recent imports from Japan or had been acquired from Indigenous groups farther north. By the 1980s—with no living dogs to back up Coast Salish oral traditions—some Western scholars expressed skepticism the dogs had existed as a distinct breed, or that dog hair was really used in the traditional blankets, by then preserved only in a handful of museum specimens. Coast Salish women, who bred and kept woolly dogs, spun and wove their wool into beautiful blankets worn as symbols of authority. ...
Source: ScienceNOW - Category: Science Source Type: news