“Sure, it’d be a lot more convenient if you could harvest it whenever you wanted. But doing it the right way is part of our culture,” he said. “And so it makes absolutely no sense to me that our ancestors would just get rid of the woolly dogs because it was more convenient to use something else.”
Not understanding human beings at all.
The background:
But it was a dog, cultivated over millennia, that produced one of the more unusual materials for their weaving.
To ensure breed purity, the dogs were kept on islets, tended by Salish women who visited by canoe, bringing food including Pacific salmon, herring and other marine mammals. The dogs were sheared with mussel shell knives.
So, the claim is not just normal humanity but whitey did it. Ho Hum.
It does look like they may have been a victim of the previous wave of Woke. The godbotherers of the C19 & early C20th telling the native people that white is black & you can’t continue what you’ve been doing for thousands of years because we don’t approve.
You might be right BiS.
But being abysmally lazy myself, I can easily believe that the Salish might have found it less of a bother to just buy the Hudson’s Bay Company blankets.
Suspicious that this particular type of dog was known to be different from other ordinary dogs, and they were even kept segregated on islands and tended by women to guarantee breed purity….but they don’t even have a name for the fuckers. The natives and the Guardian would have loved to parade some polysyllabic name for us to admire, but no. Just “woolly dog”. This looks like someone working really hard in the “invented native traditions” industry.
@Mr Vara
I’m quite willing to believe that ” Kwulasultun” hasn’t got a drop of Salish blood in him. We see Universities involved. In their current form, no different from the godbotherers of the C19th who would destroy a culture to get the people prostrating themselves to the Yid Acrobat. And this time round they’ll be trying to destroy what’s left in the name of the god of diversity.
“…bringing food including Pacific salmon, herring and other marine mammals.”
“Other”?
The grauniad probably woudn’t want to mention whalemeat.
Should stone age lifestyles have been preserved somehow?
Is the inherent ignorance and poverty of living like that something we should respect?
Should we be sad the autochthons now have electricity and antibiotics and indoor plumbing? Is that something the White Man needs to apologise for?
Steve, it wasn’t a matter of choice. Whitey made a practise of imposing whitey culture on the Americas & actively prohibiting indigenous cultures. Right back to 1492. The Acrobatic Yid was going to triumph come what may. And no doubt the Graun article will be documenting the latest version. Imposing on the natives a traditional culture they’ve either forgotten about or didn’t have in the first place. Again with no choice. Our latest religion. The worship of academia.
After spending about a year actually shearing a hairy dog with a mussel shell, then spinning and weaving to make a blanket,,,,,,,when you could just buy a lovely woollen one from a trading company……. Common sense leads to the end of the wooly dog, not the evil whitey.
’In recent years, there has been talk of reviving both the species and the weaving techniques that used dog hair, said White-Hill, who is working on a children’s book about furry canines.
“It’s not like Jurassic Park,” he cautioned.’
Well, no. The fences will not need to be so high, for one thing.
BiS – Yes, Jesus Christ obviously wins, because He will come again in glory to judge the living and the dead, and His kingdom will have no end.
What does crude pagan magic have to offer that compares to eternal life? Our own ancestors found the good news to be irresistible. So much so, they founded an entire civilisation on it. The greatest civilisation this world has ever known, in whose guttering flames we are yet warmed.
So I’m not too fussed about the indigenes’ traditional culture of being half-naked savages. Priorities, mate. Priorities.
BiW:
Not just whalemeat
If you can introduce me to the bloke enjoying eternal life, Steve, I’ll take you seriously.
The US Constitution* owes its origins to the political practises of half naked native savages. And thus the French Revolution & our own modern parliamentary system.
*That’s the delegate system deciding leadership & policy rather than the divine right of kings or a hereditary ruling class.
BiS @ 11.04 “Whitey made a practise of imposing whitey culture on the Americas & actively prohibiting indigenous cultures”.
For some reason the left and the Gruan don’t seem to have a problem with non whitey imposing their culture on whitey and actively prohibiting whitey indigenous culture in the UK though does there?
BiS – you’ve got it backwards. It’s eternity we should take seriously, not this temporary noise and chatter.
I wouldn’t describe Classical Greece and Rome as half naked savages, even though they were Italian and Greek. Certainly the Spartiates were cunts, but only idiots think Sparta was cool.
Eternity’s a long day, Steve. At what point do overtime rates kick in?
I do find this obsession with living for ever a curious one. Why would one want to? Life’s like suiting fabric. It’s the quality that’s important not the quantity. Now well started on my 8th decade I realise I’m going to have to be making the choice fairly soon. Since heart disease or cancer are so far failing to their duty. Or even bothering about showing up. I certainly have no intentions on embarking on a 9th. Life after all is only memories. Everybody’s life is exactly the same length. All of it. Better to stop before the only new ones being acquired are crap.
> To ensure breed purity, the dogs were kept on islets, tended by Salish women who visited by canoe
Or to put it another way. The dogs were imprisoned on islets from which they couldn’t escape, couldn’t live naturally, couldn’t catch enough food to support themselves and were entirely dependant on the Salish who fed them a diet they’d not have experienced in the wild. All so they could exploit them…
Indeed Mr Crook. And best not to enquire how they treated the dogs. Doubtful they were signed up to the Kennel Club
Changing uses because it’s “more convenient to use something else” is *EXACTLY how culture and technology develops, and is EXACTLY how people become better off. 90 days to make a blanket, or 90 minutes? Which one gives you 89.96 days available to do additional things? Why do I walk to the shops? Because crawling takes longer and leaves me less time to do other things *IN* *ADDITION* to going to the shops.
Talkin’ about Whitey. Saw this in the Letter on the Torygraph:
SIR – The cellist Sheku Kanneh-Mason describes feeling uncomfortable about the playing of Rule, Britannia! at the Last Night of the Proms (report, January 21).
Perhaps if there was wider awareness of the origins of these words, minds might be set to rest.
Rule, Britannia! was inspired by a lad from Penryn, Cornwall. Thomas Pellow was 11 years old and on his first sea voyage with his uncle when they were captured by Barbary pirates and taken into horrific, cruel, brutal slavery under Sultan Moulay Ismail in North Africa. Pellow was one of over a million Europeans who were enslaved in North Africa between the 16th and 19th centuries.
After 23 years he made his escape and returned to Penryn in 1737. He wrote a book about his enslavement, which helped inspire a poem by James Thomson. This was then set to music by Thomas Arne in 1740.
So, Rule, Britannia! is an exhortation – a command to the Royal Navy to prevent Britons being enslaved by pirates who captured our ships, raided our shores and put fear into many coastal communities over a good many years.
I never knew that. Thought it was sung just to annoy the French. I might even learn the words.
Worth reading the words of the original version from the Arthur masque: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rule%2C_Britannia!
They were also considered status symbols for high ranking women (the elites) and part of the reason they died out was that the elite class lost a lot of their status once the Europeans came in.
Given the British propensity to utilise any new resources it found useful across the Empire you have to presume the reason the evil colonists didn’t take control of this domesticated resource was that it wasn’t actually that useful.
“Before European contact the Coast Salish peoples, wove blankets, leggings, and tumplines out of mountain goat wool, dog hair, and other fibres……Sheep were introduced to Vancouver Island in the 1850s, providing a more plentiful source of wool.”
Still plenty of mountain goats around funnily enough
The local knitwear is very similar to Fair Isle style as knitting was introduced by the settlers
BiS – very interesting indeed, thanks for sharing
The cellist Sheku Kanneh-Mason describes feeling uncomfortable about the playing of Rule, Britannia!
Good, let’s play it more.
>But for Eliot White-Hill, an artist whose Coast Salish name is Kwulasultun, that explanation didn’t feel right. “In our culture, it’s not about cutting corners, even when it’s easier and more convenient.” He points to the strict protocol for harvesting of cedar boughs, which must be gathered before dawn to ensure the sacred aspects of tree remain intact.
Luxury beliefs are only for those that can afford them.
When you’re a dirt-poor farmer/hunter-gatherer, you can’t afford to turn down a fully-functional, pre-made, wool blanket that you can trade a bushel of corn or meat for – stuff you were doing already – rather than having to spend another 20 hours+ to make it yourself out of dog hair.
Like, really, if the dog hair genuinely was competitive – it would still exist. Because the ‘colonizers’ would have started breeding them industrially too.
I wondered about the cedar boughs. Wonder what they were using for? There’s often a good reason behind traditions. People don’t just make them up to make things difficult. Maybe something to do with the sap content?
One also wonders why they were using dog fur when they had goats. Although the goat was an introduced species by the Columbian exchange. So not that traditional. But dog fur can be water repellent, depending on breed. Unlike sheep wool. And one can see a requirement for a non-water absorbent blanket. So maybe they stopped doing whatever they’d been doing required that. The canoe the clue? That may be the clue to the cedar boughs as well.
– What does crude pagan magic have to offer that compares to eternal life? Our own ancestors found the good news to be irresistible. So much so, they founded an entire civilisation on it. The greatest civilisation this world has ever known . . .
The concept of eternal life is hardly unique to Judeo-Christians; it’s pretty universal to religion in one form or another. Its ancient origin as a mental / emotional coping strategy was almost inevitable in a feeling species that can remember and predict death well. I certainly agree that ours is the greatest civilisation evah, but the great part is quite recent compared to the age of Christianty, most of which was appalling misery for most involved. Something, something north west european emerged over time and made Christianty great.
Mostly England, to be germanely frank.
And don’t forget the Judeo-Mohammaden tradition. Same borrowed monotheo for approved cult members to spend eternity with, but truly ghastly shite.
Foundational maybe, but not of greatness.
I find it hard to believe our great civilisation was founded on Christianity. More Christianity was founded on a great civilisation. And since that civilisation’s decay was concurrent with Christianity’s rise, one has to wonder about cause & effect & which way round. And the modern world only really arises as the church loses its grip. It can’t be accident that the nations that were poorest longest were the ones still blighted by Catholicism or Orthodoxy. And just look at at Islam.*
Religions are never going to be engines for change because change will always be the enemy of religion. Religions have a vested interest the status quo. Unless they’re in the process of taking over.
*No I don’t buy the myth about the great Islamic culture. Because I don’t buy the heads-on-coins version of history. Islam was fortunate to inherit what remained of Roman civilisation when it was still largely in working order. Arabia might have produced camel jockeys & goat shaggers who were handy with a sword. But it didn’t produce much in the way of scholars & most importantly skilled craftsmen.
If it takes dressing up forestry management as respecting ancient indigenous knowledge to get proper fire breaks I can live with that. Given the current environmental zeal it might be the only way to achieve some sensible policies.
Religions are never going to be engines for change because change will always be the enemy of religion. Religions have a vested interest the status quo. Unless they’re in the process of taking over.
Religions aren’t meant to be the engine for change. They’re meant to be a brake, to slow things down and ensure we don’t go too far, too crazy, too fast.
You need a group saying “hang on, maybe that isn’t the best idea because it’ll send the world to hell in a handcart”. Otherwise you end up with men thinking they can be women and that people can change gender at will, several times a day…
Better to have a roadmap to keep you out of perdition, even if it means slowing things down, or stopping altogether in some cases.
But dog fur can be water repellent, depending on breed. Unlike sheep wool.
Sheep’s wool is highly water repellent, but we take nearly all the lanolin out during processing.