Aided by the advent of the internet, knitting has enjoyed a resurgence over the past two decades, particularly among younger generations drawn to the craft as a stress-relieving and potentially eco-friendly pastime. The growing number of knitting blogs and the popularity of the online platform Ravelry allows patterns and objects to circulate on- and off-line with ease, generating both economic and cultural capital for a number of craftspeople and communities.

Like recipes and similar artisanal practices, knitting patterns and knitted objects frustrate easy classification with respect to their position as intellectual property under the current regime of copyright law. As a tangible medium, the paper or PDF pattern is covered by copyright as an image, but the process outlined in either the visual knitting charts or the technical descriptions—which themselves often repeat a vocabulary of knitting terms understood by a particular interpretive community—is not eligible for protection under Canadian copyright (Murray & Trosow 171). Although Susan Belyea addresses glassmaking in particular when she states, “we’re all working with the same tools” (qtd in Murray & Trosow 170), the claim to technical universality extends to numerous artisanal practices, including knitting, which, as a process, is comprised of merely two fundamental stitches, the knit and the purl.

As an object, it is difficult to even begin to untangle the question of who owns a piece of knitwear, given that it is indebted to a number of interwoven components that extend beyond the aesthetics produced by the pattern, such as fiber content, dye lot, needle size, product size, knitting technique, seaming technique, and gauge among other elements. A knitter may look at an existing scarf pattern that specifically calls for bulky weight yarn and adapt it to whatever they have on hand. Although this new scarf is indebted to the original bulky scarf, it is fundamentally its own object and, unless this new user re-uploads the original pattern with notes scrawled over it in pencil, no copyright infringement has occurred.

While such a system greatly benefits craftspeople who “envision their artistic practice in terms of sharing and giving” (Murray & Trosow 168), it produces a climate wherein cultural and aesthetic appropriation—though not explicitly sanctioned—is not prevented or regulated by copyright legislation. Overwhelmingly at risk of cultural appropriation under Canada’s current system are First Peoples, whose words, imagery, and patterns have long been defined and subsequently appropriated by the dominant colonial culture, which has “negative impacts on the health, wellbeing and capacity for economic self-sustenance of Aboriginal peoples” (Udy). This probe examines the fraught relationship between an influence-sharing craft community and the ethics of appropriation of cultural heritage through a study of Coast Salish Cowichan sweaters.

A Brief History of Coast Salish Knitting

The Coast Salish are a group of ethnically and linguistically related First Peoples along the Pacific Northwest coast, living in what Canadian colonizers call British Columbia, as well as the states of Washington and Oregon. In an article titled “The Coast Salish Knitters and the Cowichan Sweater: An Event of National Historic Significance,” Marianne P. Stopp provides a detailed account of the history of Coast Salish knitting, the most significant moments of which I summarize in the following paragraphs.

Long before European colonization, Coast Salish women wove mountain goat hair, dog hair, and plant fibres into valuable trade commodities, such as ceremonial blankets. Weaving was achieved by twisting spun fiber strands into each other using fingers. Until the 1970s, all wool was prepared by hand, a process that took seven months to complete, beginning with the shearing of the sheep and followed by numerous washings, dryings, and spinnings in order to make the yarn unusually durable, weatherproof, and warm.

In the 1860s, the Coast Salish women were introduced to two-needle and multiple-needle knitting by the sisters of the Catholic missions. Through a process of unravelling settler sweaters and copying their construction through trial and error, the Coast Salish reproduced the Fair-Isle style of knitting presented to them. Retaining their unique wool preparation process, the Coast Salish paired aspects of settler knitting with common motifs and symbols often found in their wordworking and basketweaving.

The entwining of traditional Coast Salish wool spinning with European knitting styles and techniques resulted in a distinct sweater that became known as the Cowichan, and demand for the quality garment was high. Although profit margins for the knitters were minimal, it nevertheless provided Coast Salish women with opportunities for economic stability:

Women were introduced to wool-working by the time they were seven or eight years old. This practice was borne partly out of economic necessity, but it also aligned with traditional Coast Salish practices of training young girls to become skilled textile producers and to live productive lives. (Stopp 15)

In a detailed study of Coast Salish knitting, Sylvia Olsen notes that, when asked how a family retained economic stability until the 1980s, most Coast Salish people would answer, “My mother knit” (7). Knitting was not only a way to make ends meet but also an important avenue for women’s agency.

Historic Cases of Appropriation

The 2010 Vancouver Olympics were rife with instances of appropriation of First Peoples’ culture. The games not only appropriated and misused depictions of sacred knowledge, such as the inukshuk, but also “commercialized products based on traditional knowledge or expressions of culture, without sharing the profits with the community from which such knowledge originated” (Udy). When the Hudson’s Bay Company revealed their Olympic clothing line, they were critiqued for appropriating the Cowichan aesthetic while outsourcing production to a third party who used cheap materials and machine-based knitting. To add insult to injury, the Bay then trademarked this inauthentic design.

The Bay is far from being the only group to engage in appropriation of the Cowichan sweater: Roots, in collaboration with Mary Maxim and Ralph Lauren have also released lines of sweaters heavily inspired by Coast Salish design, and popular yarn brands, such as Patons and Pierrot yarns, offer patterns for Cowichan sweaters that can be downloaded for free or for a minimal fee in order to entice knitters to purchase their particular yarn.

Moreover, a Ravelry search returns 202 patterns that define themselves as Cowichan or Cowichan-inspired, the majority of which are not posted by Coast Salish users. These patters serve a particular economic function related to cultural capital in the interpretive community of knitters who find their patterns online. If a knitter is introduced to a designer through free patterns that are easy to follow and yield promising results, the consumer is likely to purchase their paid patterns as well.

Online knitting platform Ravelry yields 202 results for the search term “Cowichan.”

The ease of access of such patterns allows thousands of knitters not only to begin making Cowichan sweaters for themselves but also for others in either the gift economy of craftwork or for profit—depending on the pattern’s license and /or whether knitters choose to adhere to such a legally unenforceable license. Using cheap materials from the local Michael’s rather than hand processing the yarn themselves, knitters saturate the market with appropriative knockoffs that are cheaper to produce and cheaper to ship to consumers.

Unravelling Ethical Knots

The rights of peoples with respect to cultural heritage goods pose new and pressing challenges in terms of balancing the exercise of intellectual properties with individual freedoms of creativity, collective rights, and international human rights obligations. (Coombe & Aylwin 201)

Frustratingly, nothing in the appropriative practices discussed above is actually illegal under copyright law. From a perspective grounded solely in intellectual property rights, neither the Bay nor the individual users on Ravelry posting Cowichan-inspired sweaters have transgressed any obvious legal lines.

In an article on Indigenous Cultural Heritage, George Nicolas considers how cultural “borrowings” (214) are justified as “an appreciation of the great ‘vanished race’” (214), even though their cultural heritage and expressions are still critically important in their extant culture. On the other side of the coin is dominant culture’s insistence on enforcing their own understanding of what aspects of a given marginalized people’s culture is authentic.  The popularity of Cowichan sweaters led non-native consumers to expect a certain aesthetic associated with the garment, namely that they would be made with undyed wool. When the Coast Salish women were introduced to brightly colored cotton and acrylic yarn and used this yarn in their sweaters, the designs did not sell because the sweater no longer conformed to the aesthetic expectation imposed upon the Coast Salish peoples by the settler consumer. In other words, it upset the colonizer’s notion of a distinct “Native brand.”

Of course, the obvious element undermining accusations of Western cultural appropriation of First Peoples’ craftwork that this probe has so far danced around is the fact that cultural productions are constantly being inspired and influenced by what came before, particularly in the knitting community where patterns are continuously being exchanged, modified, re-exchanged, and re-modified. The Coast Salish women adapted the settlers’ Fair Isle knitting style into the Cowichan sweater through a process of copying, and introduced their wool and spiritual symbols into an existing process. By the same logic that reproductions of the Cowichan sweater can be called appropriative, the Coast Salish can, theoretically, be accused of appropriating an existing design themselves. The prevailing attitude that knitting patterns and techniques cannot be owned is, paradoxically, that which legitimizes Coast Salish knitting as a unique variation on the craft even as it also legitimizes reproductions.

Nevertheless, “cultural heritage is the result of a dynamic, expressive, and productive practice of dialogue,” argues Rosemary Coombe and Nicole Aylwin (203). The difference therefore, between Coast Salish development of the Cowichan sweater and the Bay’s appropriation of the product is that the former were engaged in a process of creating through dialogue—a non-consensual dialogue, I might add, whereby settlers “educated” Coast Salish women in catholic missions. Rather that present Fair-Isle knitting right back to the colonizer, the Coast Salish women wove their own pre-existing culture into the designs. Conversely, the Bay branded their sweaters as being Cowichan when, in fact, it neglected much of the processes which make Cowichan sweaters distinctive—that is to say, the fact that the sweaters are handmade and one of a kind.

Face Of Native is a small indigenous business that produces and ships authentic Coast Salish goods worldwide.

Moreover, the Cowichan sweater is more than just a knit object. As Nicholas argues, “many Indigenous peoples perceive their world as one in which material objects are more than just things, and in which ancestral spirits are part of this existence, rather than of some other realm” (216). The fibre production that was an important component of the original Cowichan sweaters was part of the fabric of Coast Salish spirituality: “The action of spinning the wool into yarn is presumed to have held transformational elements [and] goat hair and goat hair blankets were central to spirit quest dances” (Stopp 13). By calling a sweater produced by overseas machinery a Cowichan sweater, the Bay fails to account for the deeply spiritual processes involved in the authentic garments’ production. It also fails to acknowledge the ways in which, as previously mentioned, the sweater held a central place in the Coast Salish economy. To call a knit object Cowichan is therefore to imbue it with historical, cultural, and economic significance unique to Coast Salish heritage.

Finally, for close to a century, the “Indian Act” made it illegal for First Peoples to practice their traditions in an effort to assimilate the First Peoples to colonial culture (Udy). Forced into residential schools and subject to assimilative policies, knitting the Cowichan sweater was a subversive act; although colonial consumers implicitly sanctioned the practice through their continuous purchase and fetishization of the sweater, the knitting practice—imbued with traditional and spiritual significance—was itself illegal, and thus the sweater’s continual production a refusal to be silenced.

It is a difficult thing to disentangle the ethics of appropriation when it comes to something as unregulated by legislature as knitting patterns and knitted objects, and thinking about this quandary likely raises more questions than answers: As descendants of the colonizer, what are the ethics of wearing a Cowichan sweater? What if it was purchased from a Coast Salish artisan? What about knitting a Cowichan sweater while using a pattern purchased by someone of Coast Salish heritage? Copyright law fails to provide an answer that meaningfully addresses the cultural history buried beneath these questions.

Cultural oppression and racism against the Coast Salish and other First Peoples are not merely a stain on Canadian history, but an ongoing issue that continues to have a negative impact on these communities. It is therefore vital that craftspeople and consumers of hand-crafted objects remain vigilant over their own practices and refuse to contribute to the ongoing disenfranchisement of these communities by claiming ownership over cultural property they have no claim to.

Resources exist for those who wish to buy an authentic Cowichan sweater and ensure that the economic and cultural capital is awarded to the right people: Cowichantribes makes accessible the contact information of numerous Coast Salish craftspeople, and Face of Native, a small Indigenous business based in British Columbia, ships high quality authentic Coast Salish goods worldwide, while ensuring that artisans are paid fairly for their work.

Works Cited

Coombe, Rosemary and Nicole Aylwin. “The Evolution Of Cultural Heritage Ethics Via Human Rights Norms.” Dynamic Fair Dealing: Creating Canadian Culture Online. Ed. Rosemary J. Coombe, Darren Wershler, and Martin Zeilinger. University of Toronto, 2014. 201-12.

Murray, Laura and Samuel Trosow. Canadian Copyright: A Citizen’s Guide. 2nd ed., Between the lines, 2013.

Nicholas, George. “Indigenous Cultural Heritage in the Age of Technological Reproducibility: Towards a Postcolonial Ethic of the Public Domain.” Dynamic Fair Dealing: Creating Canadian Culture Online. Ed. Rosemary J. Coombe, Darren Wershler, and Martin Zeilinger. University of Toronto, 2014. 213-24.

Olsen, Sylvia. “‘We Indians Were Sure Hard Workers’: A History of Coast Salish Wool Working.” MA thesis, University of Victoria, 1998. University of Victoria Libraries, http://hdl.handle.net/1828/1340. Accessed 17 Oct. 2016.

Ravelry. 2008. ravelry.com. Accessed 17 Oct. 2016.

Stopp, Marianne P. “The Coast Salish Knitters and the Cowichan Sweater: An Event of National Historic Significance.” Material Culture Review, vol. 76, Fall, 2012, https://journals.lib.unb.ca/index.php/MCR/article/view/21406/24805. Accessed 17 Oct. 2016.

Udy, Vanessa. “The Appropriation of Aboriginal Cultural Heritage: Examining the Uses and Pitfalls of the Canadian Intellectual Property Regime.” Intellectual Property Issues in Cultural Heritage: Theory, Practice, Policy, Ethics, 19 Nov. 2015. http://www.sfu.ca/ipinch/outputs/blog/canadian-intellectual-property-regime/ Accessed 17 Oct. 2016.