The other day I went to the Snuneymuxw exhibit at the Nanaimo Museum. The part that interested me most was a little plaque that said:

The Snuneymuxw had a small breed of dog whose fur was spun and woven into fabric. Through trade, they also aquired wool from mountain goats and later, sheep. As with spinners and weavers everywhere, the wool was cleaned and carded to remove debris and to separate the wool into strands. It was then woven, using the spindle whorl, into thread.

Snuneymuxw dogI had no idea! I came home wondering about those dogs: where’d they come from, and what happened to them? What did they look like?

(One of the illustrations in the exhibit includes a dog, and it’s that dog you see here. I’ve got to go back to the museum to see where the illustration comes from; I want to know if the representation of the dog is likely to be accurate, or if it’s based on what somebody imagined.)

So I’ve been musing about these dogs, and wondering where I might find out about them. Then today, the Tyee published an article about the canine history of Nanaimo, which includes this:

It was on some of these little islands that the Coast Salish women protected and tended the "little wooly dog," the only breed indigenous to this part of the world, now extinct. For a little over five decades, these dogs flit through the historical record, then are gone. First noted by George Vancouver at Restoration Point in May of 1792, and described in the same year by a crewman of the Spanish Sutil-Mexicana expedition then anchored off Gabriola Island (near Nanaimo):

The Indians also offered new blankets which we afterward concluded were of dog’s hair, partly because when the woven hair was compared with that of those animals there was no apparent difference, and partly from the great number of dogs they keep in those villages, most of them being shorn. These animals are of moderate size, resembling those of English breed, with very thick coats, and usually white: among other things they differ from those of Europe in their manner of barking, which is simply a miserable howl.

The dogs were kept on islands to prevent them from breeding with or being harmed by the bigger, meaner hunting dogs; they were fed and watered by boats dispatched daily, and shorn of their thick, water-resistant coats twice a year. The resulting cloth, often made by interweaving with cedar, was an important source of clothing and blankets, and dog ownership was a measure of social status among Salish women. [continue]

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