ADAM OLSEN -- someone at the 2010 Vancouver Olympic Committee, or the Hudson's Bay Company, decided to outsource replica Indian sweaters from Asia - that caused a firestorm of criticism
A little while back, I wrote about a singular memory I have of being surrounded
by potted chrysanthemums at the door of a long-gone greenhouse on my families
property in Brentwood Bay. It’s one of my earliest and most vivid memories,
largely, because my grandpa Ernie is in it. It's the day he advised my parents
to name their businesses after the sacred mountain ȽÁU,WELṈEW̱, or Mt. Newton as it is known
today.
While my grandfathers were both linguists, Grandpa Don an old-school
preacher-man, and Grandpa Ernie, one of our elders whose perseverance preserved
the W̱SÁNEĆ language SENĆOŦEN, I come from people who work with their hands.
My maternal grandparents perpetually had soil under their fingernails. From
them came our landscaping, garden maintenance and moss hanging basket business
that we called Mt. Newton Gardening.
From the story of Coast Salish
knitters – National Film Board (NFB) |
My paternal grandmother, Laura, was a Coast Salish knitter. Her
innovative needles produced hundreds of beautiful hand-knit products, from the
sweaters, vests, toques, socks and anything else she designed. From her work
came a business that we called Mt. Newton Indian Sweaters.
The Coast Salish knitters are talented tactile technicians. Throughout
the 20th century, our knitters knitted to survive and that was not always easy,
just like the 20th century was not easy for Indigenous people in Canada.
Relying on the price offered by the buyers in the city to feed and cloth large
families was definitely a challenge. My mother carries many stories of how our
mothers and grandmothers were given the lowest possible amount for their toils.
Upending an unjust marketplace
My parents decided to do something about the injustice and so that was
the beginning of Mt. Newton Indian Sweaters.
They created a local fair trade market place for Coast Salish knits,
commonly known as Cowichan Indian sweaters, even though knitters from Nanaimo to Saanich hand-produced the apparel. We bought
wool from a mill run by the Modeste family in the Cowichan flats, and we sold
it to the knitters for little or no profit. And, we purchased their finished
products for many times more than what they could sell them for in the city.
In the heyday we changed the market. We changed it to the point I
remember the traders from city sheepishly coming out to our sweater shop to buy
sweaters off of us to fill their orders.
When I was a boy I was also surrounded by bags of wool and sea of
knitted apparel in our sweater shop that doubled as an uninsulated floor hockey
rink. My parents went on the road with our products. When we were in the Okanagan in the late-70's and 1980's they would throw
open the doors of their van in a community park, word would spread, and soon
enough we would be sold out. Later, they met a gentleman who owned gift shops
in the Canadian Rockies and many of our west coast sweaters were sold to
visitors from around the world.
Creating a classic
The Coast Salish people were working with wool long before the arrival
of the European. We were weavers. However, when Europeans arrived on our
shores, they brought with them knitting needles and a palate of geometric
designs that our woolworkers quickly adopted. What our knitters created from
that, colloquially known as the Indian sweater, has become a cult classic.
Then in the 1990’s, as trade with Asia began to open up, the entire wool
industry was devastated by cheap, light-weight, rain-wicking fleece. Wool
mills, still largely industrial revolution age technology, were abandoned and
farmers began composting their wool because their market had crashed. Many of
the Coast Salish knitters hung up their needles and went off to post-secondary
school. It was at this point that the Olsen family shut down the business.
But then someone at the 2010 Vancouver Olympic Committee, or the
Hudson's Bay Company (HBC), decided to outsource replica Indian sweaters from
Asia for the Vancouver Olympic Games.
Well, that caused a firestorm of criticism and an outpouring of
frustration.
One of the redeeming qualities of the Coast Salish knits is their
incredible longevity. If you can keep moths away then they are the most prized
inheritance from a parent, grandparent, aunt or uncle. So, that is when people
started renewing their relationship with their Coast Salish knits and they
began digging their old sun-bleached sweaters out of their closets.
A woolen revival
In an act of defiance against the HBC, folks began looking for a knitter
to produce something new for them. That was not easy because, in the 20
previous years, most of the knitters had passed and few of their children
continued the work. In the ensuing years, my mother, Sylvia Olsen wrote
an award-winning book called Working with Wool: A Coast Salish Legacy and the Cowichan Sweater, and, as a
result, news outlets were interviewing her about the faux pas of the
Olympic-sized decision.
So, my mom, my sister Joni and I got together in 2010 to talk about
reviving the tradition and creating a new more modern edition of the Coast
Salish knits. Salish Fusion Knitwear was born.
We struck up a relationship with Custom Woolen Mills in Alberta to
produce the classic white, brown and three grey blends of natural western Canada wool that were a signature of the
Cowichan-inspired product. Just as in the day of our grandmothers, we began to
innovate using hand-operated knitting machines to produce bolts of fabric that
were later turned into shawls, handbags and virtually anything else my mom and
sister's minds could design. They began experimenting with felting and fulling
processes that added a distinguished quality to our high-end wearable Coast
Salish wool art. Finally, we put our business online. and in the holiday craft
fairs in Victoria and Vancouver. We couldn't make enough product to fill the
demand.
Taking on Dragon's
In the early days, Joni and I pitched
our business
on the CBC hit show Dragon’s Den, where we were briefly featured in January
2013, and we even knit Prime Minister Justin Trudeau a replica of his father's
sweater featured in an early 1980's Christmas
card.
We hand delivered it to him when he visited UVic.
We are still making custom products. In
recent months our website has been taken down and our family is going through
another phase, the political phase.
With both Joni and I working as elected
officials we have a lot on our plates so we are taking a bit of a hiatus from
producing large quantities of stock. However, when my nephew Joey was asked
what he was going to do when we grew up, he said he is going to take over his
mother’s knitting business.
There is hope that Coast Salish knits will be
passed on from our generation to the next, and our kids' needles will be made
light by the passion and innovation of their grandmother and great-grandmother.
Adam Olsen ... is a Green
Party Member of the Legislative Assembly of British Columbia for Saanich North
and the Islands.
Born in Victoria, BC in 1976, Adam has lived, worked
and played his entire life on the Saanich Peninsula. He is a member of Tsartlip
First Nation (W̱JOȽEȽP), where he
and his wife, Emily, are raising their two children, Silas and Ella.
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