In 2007, Coast Salish weavers honored the Upper Skagit elder Vi Hilbert--renowned for her role in reviving the Lushootseed language in the Puget Sound region--by covering her with a newly woven blanket of mountain-goat hair, the first produced in many generations. The ceremony was a memorable sight, as the aging and slight Hilbert had to sit firmly in a chair while a weaver carefully draped the fifteen-pound blanket over her shoulders, allowing the elder to bear the weight of tradition with enormous pride and gratitude.
This event was one of a number of ceremonies and exhibits that publicly reintroduced the revived textile manufacture of Coast Salish blankets in southwestern British Columbia and western Washington State. It is a most welcome renaissance--by both Coast Salish communities and scholars--who have long anticipated wider recognition of the material arts from the lower Northwest Coast, so often overshadowed by the wood-carving traditions of indigenous communities to the north.
Salish Blankets brings this heritage to an even larger audience through a fruitful collaboration between Canadian Museum of History curator Leslie H. Tepper, hereditary Squamish chief and cultural leader Janice George (Chepximiya Siyam), and Squamish weaver and teacher Willard Joseph (Skwetsimltexw). While the volume documents a range of weavings, including belts and tumplines, the Salish blanket, as ceremonial robe, is the central focus, to be understood as “an object of extraordinary complexity” (xiii). Such textiles, worn in public forums, were widely admired symbols of wealth and prestige that reflected specific visions and skills of individual women weavers and the communities from which they came. In wearing these treasures, which came into the world through ancestral and supernatural guidance, a man or woman was transformed, able to enter sacred space, spiritually protected and emotionally comforted during moments of significant change: births, namings, marriages, mournings, and, later, moments of defiance and strength in the face of settler-colonists.
An opening chapter presents a framework of knowledge essential for understanding Salish weaving, as embodied in the teachings of elders, hunters, and artists, and in the research of ethnologists, historians, and archaeologists. The authors concisely cover a great breadth of cultural and artifactual details, from the significance of Salish cosmology, the procurement of animal hair from small wooly domesticated dogs or mountain goats, the spinning of wool on elaborately carved spindle whorls, and the use of plant dyes. A lengthy treatment of the historical legacy of Salish weaving follows, in which the authors explain what is known about the character of women’s past weaving skills and the post-contact dynamic of tradition and innovation, where blankets increasingly served as gifts and currency, reflected the influence of European cloth and clothing, and represented high social status of individuals and communities during negotiations with colonial authorities.
A third chapter establishes a ceremonial typology of blankets used--in the past and the present--for sitting, standing, puberty and naming rites, weddings, memorials, and displays of chiefly nobility. Included here is a rare discussion of blanket “scrambles,” where hosts ritually tore apart robes and redistributed the pieces as gifts to guests, to be taken home, respun, and incorporated into new textiles, which in true potlatch fashion recirculated material wealth and reinforced regional reciprocal relations. This is followed by a description of geometric motifs and patterns, colors and designs. The authors compare the imaginative recombinations of squares, triangles, and lines in textiles with those of the well-documented traditions of Salish basketry.
Chapter 5 presents five “great weavings” from the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, now held in museum collections. The authors examine these remarkable textiles with the fresh eyes of modern weavers; there is careful attention to design, motifs, colors, and edges as unique statements of aesthetic judgements and artistic skills. Weavers of the present thus insightfully comment on weavers from the past. A single artist’s perspective on weaving today, presented as an autobiographical narrative, concludes the volume. The singular voice of Joy Joseph-McCullough (Siyaltemaat), discussing her influences, hopes, and relationships to other weavers and First Nations’ people, is a wonderfully personal means to articulate the good feelings necessary to produce great Salish art.
There are two appendices. The first lists more than two-hundred museum holdings of Salish textiles around the world, while the second is a compilation of short “teachings” and stories used in educating younger Coast Salish on weaving matters, as well as on the spiritual relationships involved in hunting mountain goats, and the protocol for wearing robes properly. Such teachings are usually restricted to private family-weaver relations, and sharing them here openly invites readers into the intimacy of the intellectual roots of the artistic process, a gift intended by the authors to inspire future Salish weavers.
In forty years of archival work and reading the extensive literature of Coast Salish indigenous peoples, I have never seen most of the valuable archival photographs presented in this book to illustrate the use and design of robes in the past. These black and white photographs are complemented by color photographs of weavers and their robes in the present. Yet, surprisingly, this richly illustrated volume contains just one map that presents little detail and rather oddly identifies the names of tribes in western Washington State using a plural form (e.g., Lummis). Moreover, I believe the book would have benefitted from at least a short historiographic discussion of the relative invisibility of Salish weaving vis-à-vis other material traditions of the Northwest Coast that have so overwhelmingly dominated anthropological writing, museum representation, and the market over the past century. And, finally, while it is beyond the scope of this volume, I am hoping that someone in the near future will explore the more recent emergence of “story blankets,” which combine the rich heritage of ancient pictographic rock art in the region with the production of textiles as an expression of community identity.
Through its portrait of artistic practices past and present, and the working intercultural relationships that bring them into public view, this beautifully designed book represents the future of indigenous material culture studies. In its collaborative character, Salish Blankets unites heritage professionals and artists, who articulate individual interests on their own terms, and forges institutional connections among Native communities, museums, and distant nations, projecting ancient and present cultural practices across boundaries of time and geography. It is a literary act of reconciliation and an educational celebration, a most welcome contribution to museum and indigenous studies.
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[Review length: 1055 words • Review posted on April 12, 2018]