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    Woolgathering: Awareness of the Foreign in Published Works About Cowichan Woolworking: Alt-Academic, #1
    Woolgathering: Awareness of the Foreign in Published Works About Cowichan Woolworking: Alt-Academic, #1
    Woolgathering: Awareness of the Foreign in Published Works About Cowichan Woolworking: Alt-Academic, #1
    Ebook69 pages43 minutesAlt-Academic

    Woolgathering: Awareness of the Foreign in Published Works About Cowichan Woolworking: Alt-Academic, #1

    By Paula Johanson

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    Working in wool to make traditional woven blankets and modern knitting has long been a primary cultural communication method of people in Cowichan First Nation, but published comments suggest non-Cowichan people have consistently failed to understand what was being communicated. An examination of the last 240 years of published comments on Cowichan woolworking shows themes of foreignness and co-operation emphasized throughout. In Woolgathering, author Paula Johanson presents examples of an ongoing commentary, not only on the fabric-making of the Cowichan people but on the idea of foreignness, in a particularly West Coast manifestation.

     

    This short monograph presents a discussion of published works on this kind of woolwork, from the ship's logs of Cook and Vancouver, through gunboat colonialism, to international fibre arts historians and Indigenous artists' statements. Discussions of Literature of the West Coast, or history, mean little without an understanding of experiences of people living in that place and time. Indigenous woolwork, both traditional weaving and modern knitting, is a technology well adapted for people's needs. These knitted and woven works, recognizable at a glance, identify both makers and wearers as people living in close association with this place and time.

     

    Paula Johanson is a Community Fellow in the Electronic Textual Cultures Lab at the University of Victoria, with a graduate certificate in Digital Humanities. She was a Community Fellow in UVic's Centre for Co-operative and Community-Based Economy, while completing her master's degree in Canadian literature. Her master's essay is the basis for the text of Woolgathering: Awareness of the Foreign in Published Works About Cowichan Woolworking.

     

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherDoublejoy Books
    Release dateOct 18, 2021
    ISBN9781989966167
    Woolgathering: Awareness of the Foreign in Published Works About Cowichan Woolworking: Alt-Academic, #1
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    Author

    Paula Johanson

    Paula Johanson is a Canadian writer. A graduate of the University of Victoria with an MA in Canadian literature, she has worked as a security guard, a short order cook, a teacher, newspaper writer, and more. As well as editing books and teaching materials, she has run an organic-method small farm with her spouse, raised gifted twins, and cleaned university dormitories. In addition to novels and stories, she is the author of forty-two books written for educational publishers, among them The Paleolithic Revolution and Women Writers from the series Defying Convention: Women Who Changed The World. Johanson is an active member of SF Canada, the national association of science fiction and fantasy authors.

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      Woolgathering - Paula Johanson

      Acknowledgement

      I acknowledge, as history scholar Sylvia Olsen does, the importance and difficulty of using appropriate names for people of Colonial and First Nations descent. The colonists cannot be called Englishmen because many were Scots and some were women; they weren’t all European because many were Canadian or American-born or even of African descent. And that issue is the easiest dilemma of naming people in the subject of this paper, Woolgathering.

      Like Olsen, literary scholar Alan Twigg uses the terms First Nation Indian native indigenous aboriginal Coast Salish  Salish and Siwash in his book Aboriginality when each of these words is appropriate for the times and events being discussed. Words can change quickly or slowly, but courtesy is always appropriate. In this text, I hope to follow the examples set by Olsen, Twigg, and film-maker Christine Welsh in using a variety of names – always with courteous intent and consideration for other people’s perspectives.

      Introduction

      In the logbook from the Nootka portion of his 1778 voyage around the world, Captain James Cook recorded trading for a sort of woollen stuff, or blanketing¹; Cook collected several woollen blankets woven by First Nations people of the Pacific Northwest coast in their traditional manner. The distinctive qualities of Cowichan woolworking have been remarked upon many times since, and understanding this history of commentary is a crucial step toward understanding the Cowichan sweater’s place within non-Cowichan culture. On a January 2013 episode of CBC television’s show Dragon’s Den, for example, when Salish Fusion Knitworks pitched a business expansion plan, the dragon investors dismissed it as too small with the rude statement How many grandmothers can you enslave?; this reply carries with it a complex array of cultural assumptions about the Cowichan people, about First Nations peoples, and about woolworking. Woolworking has long been a primary cultural communication method of the Cowichan people, but as these comments suggest, non-Cowichan people have consistently failed to understand what was being communicated. When we examine the last 240 years of comments on Cowichan woolworking, whether published works by non-Cowichan authors primarily intended for non-Cowichan readers, or published works involving Cowichan participation, we see emphasized throughout the question of foreignness.

      During this inquiry, I will compare and contrast the approaches of such works as official 19th-century colonial reports, 20th-century newspaper articles, 21st-century films and television, books by fibre arts professionals, and juried art shows accompanied by books based on artists’ statements. These published works can be considered together as examples of an ongoing commentary, not only on the fabric-making of the Cowichan people but on the idea of foreignness, in a particularly West Coast manifestation. For each of these writers, their statements about Cowichan woolworking have been accompanied by their awareness of something foreign, by any of several definitions of the word foreign. The speaker is aware of a different culture or country, subject to a different jurisdiction of law, and with different customs, where the people are different in appearance because of race and clothing as well as different in behaviours such as work, food preparation and home life – different, that is, from the speaker’s own norms, or those of the intended reader. In the case of the Cowichan people, I am discussing here the gathering and processing of wool – first the wool of mountain goats and wool dogs and later the wool of sheep – by Cowichan woolworkers, in culturally specific ways anchored in the experience of a particular place.

      Cowichan is the name of a bay and a fertile

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