Working with Wool: A Coast Salish Legacy and the Cowichan Sweater
Sylvia Olsen married a Coast Salish man when she was seventeen and moved to Tsartlip First Nation. She was immediately struck by the ingenuity Coast Salish women displayed in their production of Cowichan sweaters, which soon became Sylvia's passion. She operated a Cowichan sweater shop for sixteen years on the reserve. From there she marketed the sweaters locally and abroad until the early 1990s, when the markets began to disappear and the once-booming industry faded. Sylvia then returned to university, making the Coast Salish knitters the subject of her master s thesis; the theme of a National Film Board documentary, The Story of the Coast Salish Knitters; and the topic of a picture book, Yetsa's Sweater.  The sweaters became, for me, a symbol of our collective history in this province of British Columbia, Sylvia says.  They represent not just my life, that of an immigrant in an indigenous community, but all of our lives, Coast Salish and settlers alike. The Cowichan sweater story, to me, is a tale, a collective history, about how diverse people converged to create a unique and truly amazing sweater, and how the sweater affected the people who shared that history.  Sylvia Olsen is the author of twelve books for young people, most recently Counting On Hope, historical fiction set on British Columbia's west coast, which was nominated for the BC Book Prize in Children's Literature. She lives in North Saanich, near Victoria, British Columbia.