The actor and director of mixed Cowichan and settler descent, who grew up in Qualicum Beach but lives in Winnipeg, had been busy the past few years with a web series and other film work.
Rice put out feelers in the community, and ended up contacting Galloway, whose grandfather, the late Cowichan Chief Dennis Alphonse, Rice had worked with for many years. Over the years, the sweater, developed through the intermingling of Coast Salish wool-working traditions and European techniques, has become a fashion statement.
Galloway initially worried there wouldn’t be enough knitters to interview, due to the dwindling number of people practising the craft. For this project, she and producer Tiffany Joseph often referred to themselves as story caretakers. “We’re not the owners of the story. We are there to support it and we’re there to voice this story for the community,” Galloway said. “It doesn’t belong to us — it belongs to the knitters.”
Coast Salish people adapted their wool-weaving traditions — which some have traced back to the 15th century— to European knitting techniques and tastes, with the distinctive Cowichan sweater style emerging out of that in the early 20th century. The sweaters quickly grew to become a cottage industry. In a paper on the importance of sweater knitting to Coast Salish families, Olsen — mother of B.C. Green MLA for Saanich North and the Islands Adam Olsen — noted that families were citing knitting as a means of making ends meet well into the 1980s.
Charles “Chuck” Henry, a Penelakut First Nation member with Pauquachin and Cowichan Nation heritage, learned how to knit at the age of 10 from his older sister and grandmother, who herself learned at the age of eight. That first sweater was a bit of a trial and error process. “The first sweater I made was way too big, so I had to tear it down, start all over and then it was way too small,” he said with a smile.
He also knitted slippers for half a dozen patients in the Duncan Hospital cancer ward after a nurse came looking for a way to help alleviate cold feet. According to Olsen’s book Working with Wool: A Coast Salish Legacy & the Cowichan Sweater, Modeste Wool Carding didn’t make much money but it helped transform the Cowichan sweater industry as it did away with the need for knitters to hand-card their own wool.But as the sweaters gained more renown, cheap imitators, reproductions by non-native manufacturers and international market pressures ended up driving many Coast Salish wool workers out of the sweater industry altogether, Olsen wrote.
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