They were small, white, and fluffy. For thousands of years, they were treasured for their unique wool and respected as if they were human. Then, in a matter of decades, they were gone.
The Coast Salish woolly dog was once a fixture in communities across what’s known today as the Pacific Northwest. With pointy ears and an upturned tail, the canine looked a bit like the modern Samoyed. And now, recent genomic sequencing echoes what many members of Indigenous nations surrounding the Salish Sea have always said: that their ancestors carefully bred the dog for many generations—long before the arrival of European domestic dogs—shearing their thick hair and weaving it into blankets imbued with cultural and spiritual significance.
“Whoever put it on would be enveloped by the power of the prayer,” says Michael Pavel, a Skokomish/Twana traditional knowledge keeper and one of the study’s coauthors.
But by the late 19th and early 20th centuries, the combination of introduced diseases, forced assimilation, and other culturally oppressive colonial policies devastated the dogs’ caretakers, and, as a result, led to the extinction of their venerated companions, elders say.
“The dog was raised specifically for these blankets, but it became a casualty of the colonial times,” says Steven Point, Stó:lō Nation grand chief, chancellor of the University of British Columbia, and former lieutenant governor of British Columbia.
Point gave researchers at the Smithsonian Institution permission to analyze the fleece of Mutton, a woolly dog believed to have been raised in Stó:lō territory. British naturalist and ethnographer George Gibbs cared for Mutton during the Northwest Boundary Survey in the late 1850s, and after the dog fell ill and died in 1859, Gibbs donated his pelt to the Smithsonian. But it wasn’t until evolutionary molecular biologist Audrey Lin saw a photo of Mutton’s pelt in a 2021 Hakai Magazine story that anyone at the Smithsonian pursued testing the specimen to understand its history.
“The nature of genetic sampling or genetic analysis is destructive, so we wanted to know if the communities would be OK with this sort of research,” says Lin, who at the time was a postdoctoral researcher at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of National History.
When Point first heard about the pelt and the project, he was ecstatic. His mother had relayed stories to him from her grandmother about woolly dogs, but no one alive today had ever seen one. “To find out that somebody actually had one was kind of like finding an old Rembrandt somewhere,” he says. “It’s confirming the stories that we’ve always told. It’s confirming part of our history.”
The results of the genetic analysis were published in the journal Science in December 2023 in a study that combines Western scientific research, traditional knowledge, and historical records.
‘Little beings’
While some scholars around the turn of the 20th century speculated that woolly dogs hailed from Japan or another part of the world, the study refutes those claims. Mutton’s DNA indicates that woolly dogs genetically veered from other canines as long as 5,000 years ago. This matches the rough age of suspected woolly dog remains found at archaeological sites around the Pacific Northwest, according to a 2020 study.
Even Mutton, who lived after European settlers first arrived in the area, had only about 16 percent European ancestry, according to the research, suggesting that tribes went to great lengths to prevent their unique breed of dog from intermixing with others.
Debra Sparrow, a Musqueam Nation master weaver and study coauthor, learned about woolly dogs from her grandfather. He drove her one time to see Poplar Island on the Fraser River. “He pointed and said, ‘That’s where they kept the woolly dogs for this village,’” she recalls.
In addition to islands, some communities might have housed them in pens or kept them in their longhouses. In an 1856 painting by Paul Kane, a woman weaves a blanket inside as a small white creature sits next to her.
Sparrow says her grandfather recalled playing under a loom as a child while the women in his family weaved. Their blankets twined dog wool, mountain goat wool, and stinging nettle fibers, and the women applied a rock powder, known today as diatomaceous earth, to ward off bugs to preserve the blankets for ceremonies.
As her grandfather outlined the steps of this weaving process, she says, he mentioned that they used to source their wool from small, fox-like creatures they kept in pens. They didn’t look like other dogs, he said.
The analysis of Mutton’s pelt identified 28 genes related to hair and follicle regeneration, including ones linked to curly hair in mice, rats, and some dogs, as well as to woolly hair in some humans, providing insight into what made their hair so thick and valuable for weaving. This large collection of genes also reflects the intensity and considerable length of time that the Coast Salish people selectively bred the dogs, according to Logan Kistler, an anthropologist at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History who contributed to the study. “The culture really shaped the dog,” Kistler says.
Though she understands why the term is used, Sparrow bristles when she hears them called “dogs.” It’s not how her grandfather would have referred to them.
“He said, ‘It’s not a dog,’” she recalls. “It was a wild, domesticated little being that every village had because we needed the hair, so it was a gift to us.”
The Skokomish viewed them as on par with people, according to Pavel. They constructed villages, not pens, for them. “We looked at how they cared for themselves and for their children, for their families,” he says. “We saw them as societies.”
When did the woolly dog disappear?
The study doesn’t pinpoint exactly when woolly dogs went extinct or their decline began, but the traditional knowledge incorporated into the study counters the persistent, non-Native narrative: That Coast Salish people gave up their weaving tradition—and thus their woolly dogs—of their own accord, with the arrival of British and American machine-made blankets in the 19th century.
The manufactured blankets were popular, Point says, but “I don’t know if you could strictly draw a line between the disappearance of the woolly dog and the introduction of Hudson’s Bay blankets. I think that’s too simplistic.”
By all accounts, families were devoted to the dogs. It doesn’t make sense that they suddenly would have become indifferent to them when manufactured blankets arrived, says coauthor Senaqwila Wyss, who curated an exhibit on woolly dogs at the Museum of North Vancouver. During an emergency, for example, women would scoop up only their children and their woolly dogs, according to accounts from Squamish elders that Wyss found.
Instead, population declines and efforts to eradicate Coast Salish culture played a significant role, the study says. Smallpox and other diseases sometimes killed upwards of 90 percent of a community. Boarding schools in Canada and the United States sought to erase Indigenous identities and history, while the Indian Act in Canada deprived women who could pass on their knowledge of weaving and woolly dogs of basic rights. In some areas, law enforcement and government agents seized or ordered the dogs killed as part of the effort to destroy their culture, according to oral histories relayed by multiple coauthors of the study.
The animals simply couldn’t survive without their caretakers or the preservation of their culture, the study says.
“We didn’t give up on the woolly dog for the benefit of something that was easier to acquire,” Pavel says. “It was taken from us.”
The afterlife of the woolly dog
Recently, a family in British Columbia noticed their deceased dog looked like renderings of Coast Salish woolly dogs. Because the nature of their disappearance isn’t entirely known, it’s possible that some isolated communities might have dogs with a small proportion of woolly dog genes. “But they aren’t like woolly dogs,” Lin says.
Instead, Pavel says, the legacy of the woolly dog is in its teachings of “unconditional love, of loyalty and zeal for life.” They have become an emblem for the Skokomish Indian Tribe, appearing on baskets and in the tribe’s logo.
Sparrow has drawn inspiration from them. She’s creating a traditional blanket using the process her grandfather laid out for her. Though she’ll have to substitute sheep’s wool for the woolly dog hair, she knows she’s honoring her ancestors and relatives. But there’s an epistemological lesson to be learned from the study of the woolly dog, too.
While Sparrow expresses gratitude for the collaboration with scientists, she says Coast Salish nations didn’t need DNA to support what they already knew: “We are always having to prove our existence, prove our intelligence, prove who we are to the world.”
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