To
Native Americans known as the Coast Salish, the hair of the dog isn't
a dubious hangover cureit's a key ingredient in the large,
beautiful blankets woven by their ancestors more than a century ago.
A molecular analysis of some of these venerable textiles now confirms
they are made partly of yarn spun from the fur of an unusual canine,
verifying oral accounts handed down through the Pacific Northwest
tribe over generations.
The Coast Salish live in northern Washington
and southern British Columbia, and according to tribal lore, their
ancestors raised a strange breed of canine. The Salish woolly dog
was bred, the story goes, specifically for its fleecy undercoat
and long outer hairs, which were woven into the famous Salish blankets.
Salish oral tradition about the canine is corroborated by historical
accounts, such as the journal of 18th century explorer George Vancouver,
who wrote that the Salish dogs had coats that were "a mixture
of a coarse kind of wool, with very fine, long hair, capable of
being spun into yarn."
Recent research shows the woolly dog probably
resembled a current breed called the Spitz, a thick-coated, curly-tailed
dog native to Finland. By 1900, however, the Salish woolly dog had
vanished. Today the only known physical evidence of it is a single
peltrediscovered in 2004 in a drawer at the National Museum
of Natural History in Washington, D.C.of a woolly dog named
"Mutton," the pet of a 19th century ethnographer who studied
the tribes of the Pacific Northwest.
Despite the tribal lore and other ample
evidence, some have dismissed the claim that Salish blankets contain
canine hair as just a shaggy-dog story. A survey of more than 100
items woven by the Salish found no dog hair, according to a seminal
1980 book on Salish textiles. And a 2006 DNA analysis that analyzed
a small sample of textiles was inconclusive.
The
new work, published in the December issue of Antiquity, sheds light
on why past studies could have missed dog hair. Using mass spectrometry,
a molecular technique for revealing the components of complex mixtures,
biochemist Caroline Solazzo of the University of York in the United
Kingdom and colleagues analyzed nine blankets woven in the 19th
or early 20th centuries by the Coast Salish. They found protein
fragments, or peptides, matching peptides from the hair of sheep
and mountain goats, as expected. But some of the peptides in five
of the nine blankets matched ones from the pelt of Mutton, indicating
that the blanket peptides comes from dog hair. Only the older blanketsthose
woven in the first half of the 19th centurycontained dog yarn,
and none of them was pure dog. (The earlier DNA analysis had looked
at only more recent blankets, which the new analysis showed did
not have dog hair.) In most cases, the weavers had combined dog
fiber with the highly prized fiber from mountain goats to make a
mixed yarn.
Canine hair was easier to come by than
mountain goat hair, which could be obtained only by trading with
nearby tribes with access to goats, the researchers say. "Dog
hair was probably used for less important blankets, blankets with
less value, and for common usage, [not] ceremonial usage,"
Solazzo says. She and her colleagues found, for example, two very
plain ceremonial blankets that contained only goat hair. The weaver
might have avoided dog hair because the blankets' stark design shows
off all their fibers rather than concealing some of them.
Klaus Hollemeyer, a researcher at Saarland
University in Saarbrücken, Germany, who developed the mass
spectrometry technique used by Solazzo's team, believes the new
work is definitive. The protein analysis is "well done and
documented," he writes via e-mail.
The new study also helps erase doubts
about the accuracy of the Salish oral tradition, says textile conservator
Susan Heald of the National Museum of the American Indian's Cultural
Resources Center in Suitland, Maryland, and a co-author of the new
study. "It's been close to 10 years since Coast Salish community
curator Marilyn Jones asked me if I could find out if dog hair was
used in any of the Coast Salish blankets" displayed in a particular
museum exhibit, Heald writes via e-mail. "I'm pleased that
we can finally tell Marilyn that we did find dog hair in the older
blankets, corroborating the oral history."
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