Little Woolly Dogs

📷 An illustration of what Mutton, a woolly dog, may have looked like by Karen Carr. Mutton was featured in the podcast as his 160-year-old pelt is part of the Smithsonian’s collection.

Every so often, our station helps larger media organizations record content locally via tape-sync! Earlier this year, we were approached by Lizzie Peabody of the Smithsonian’s Sidedoor Podcast to do a tape-sync for an episode on Coast Salish Woolly Dogs!

I first learned about Woolly Dogs while reading about the history of the Cowichan Sweater during the 2010 Winter Olympics in Vancouver, and the controversy regarding appropriated Cowichan Sweaters. A younger me wondered while reading, “Where did Indigenous people get wool without sheep pre-European colonization?” “Were mountain goats good for wool?” “Wait, they also had little woolly dogs?!” “What happened to them?!”

Since then, I’ve been curious to know more about the story of the little dogs.

From Sidedoor’s website:

For thousands of years, fluffy white dogs could be found across the Pacific Northwest. Their exceptionally soft, crimpy hair was shorn like sheep’s wool, spun into yarn, and woven into blankets and robes by indigenous women who carefully tended them in communities across Coast Salish territory. But a hundred years ago, the woolly dog quietly vanished. Why?

Today, the only known pelt of this extinct breed is in the collections of the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History, and it might hold some answers. Through collaborative research combining Western science with Indigenous knowledge, we delve into this animal’s genome to learn the real story of the woolly dog’s disappearance.

For our part, we provided tape-syncs for Liz Hammond-Kaarremaa, a local spinner and research associate with VIU and the Smithsonian, and Violet Elliot / Snu’Meethia, Snuneymuxw weaver and knowledge keeper. Both were interviewed on the subject of woolly dogs and what just happened to them.

Listen below and enjoy.