Salish weaving

The Salish are skilled weavers of the Pacific Northwest. They are most noted for their beautiful twill blankets many of which are very old. The adoption of new fabrics, dyes, and weaving techniques allow us to study a wide variety of Salish weavings today.

According to oral traditions, blankets have been used for ceremonial purposes since the beginning of time. Salish blankets identified the wearer as being a civic and religious leader in the community. Honored individuals would be adorned with a blanket to distinguish them or they would sit or stand upon their blankets so as to raise them in accordance of their honored status. Blankets also represented an individual's wealth and were often given away to members of the community or even other villages to show prosperity. Because of their high value, blankets were also used as a currency for which other goods could be purchased or bartered.

Women were in charge of making the blankets. Young girls were trained by their grandmothers as early as ten years of age, with more intense training at puberty. Weaving blankets required serious commitment and could take longs periods of time to complete. Additionally, they were often associated with spiritual tasks or rituals such as abstinence.

The name Salish refers to groups of indigenous peoples in the Pacific Northwest whose speech and culture share enough of a commonality to suggest an ancient relationship, in a similar vein to the name Indo-Europeans or the name Polynesians. The region inhabited by this group is inclusive of the north of the Fraser canyon, to Vancouver Island, both of British Columbia to Aberdeen in Washington. The Nuxálk region, farther north, also speak the Salish dialect. Though the Salishan peoples were highly stratified, with a relatively complex division of labor and a powerful elité, each village was distinct from the others, the Salish region was not unified and those people who inhabited the Salish regions did not view themselves as part of a unified Salish group, much like Indo-European and Polynesian peoples.

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