Who Made Canada's Sweater?

→ A hundred years of famous Canadians wearing one, and a century of women who made them without a plaque of their own. That plaque, at last, arrived this spring.

ALSO IN THE LETTER:

→ A new town page for Windsor, Nova Scotia; three new interactive guides; and a People of Small Towns for Canada’s twenty-fourth prime minister. → Wiarton, Ontario finds a new albino understudy to carry on Willie’s Groundhog Day tradition. → Petty Harbour, Newfoundland hands its aquarium’s animals back to the sea before winter. → St. Martins, New Brunswick — walk the ocean floor at low tide for Thanksgiving weekend. → Bull elk bugling across a golden valley at Wasagaming, Manitoba. → A Reader Writes: nine hundred replies to last week’s Paul Henderson piece. → Uncle Castor’s Storytime: Nora and Finn and the Pumpkin Boat, from Windsor, Nova Scotia. → Where Am I? — the answer from the western shore of Hudson Bay.

By Castor · Edited by Vlad Umnov · Monday, October 5, 2026 · 10 min read

Editor's Note

This week’s letter arrived in our inbox on September 30 — the National Day for Truth and Reconciliation

We did not plan it that way. Castor wrote it from Charles Hoey Park in Duncan, on Quw’utsun land, on the same day the country was asked to sit quietly with the history of residential schools and the children who did not come home from them.
His letter does not name the day. But everything in it — the Sisters of St. Ann in Duncan in 1864, an Indian agent’s grateful sentence in 1934, a woman named Cecelia knitting by candlelight in the 1950s, a plaque unveiled in March of this year — sits inside it.

Sometimes the calendar chooses the story for you.

If there is a town you have been wondering about, write to Castor. He will ask his cousin there. Happy discoveries.

The Week's Letter

Who Made Canada’s Sweater?

→ The remarkable journey of the Cowichan sweater, from Coast Salish knitters to a Canadian icon.

Duncan, British Columbia — Wednesday afternoon, September 30, 2026.

Dear 1000towns —

Cousin Duncan is wearing a sweater. It is thick, undyed wool — cream and warm brown — with two stags knitted across the front, antlers raised, and snowflake-diamond bands at the shoulders. A shawl collar folds warm around her neck.

I recognize it.

I have seen this sweater — this exact kind — a hundred times before. In old photographs and archival footage. Bing Crosby at Del Mar racetrack. Harry Truman in Kansas City. Pope John Paul II in Rome. Prince Charles and Lady Diana on their honeymoon.

And in real life, all the time: on tourists at the Vancouver airport. On mannequins in Whistler shop windows.

“That is a Canadian sweater,” I say.

Cousin Duncan smiles that restrained, patient smile one wears when waiting for a precise answer: “Whose Canadian?”

She takes me to the park to find out.

A bronze plaque was unveiled on the nineteenth of March, this year, in Charles Hoey V.C. Memorial Park, downtown Duncan. It sits on a custom metal stand painted by Stuart Pagaduan, a Coast Salish artist from the Cowichan Valley itself.

The plaque is trilingual: Hul’q’umi’num’, English, French. The Hul’q’umi’num’ comes first.

Quwutsun Swetu — The Cowichan Sweater.

Cousin Duncan reads the Hul’q’umi’num’ aloud, slowly, for both of us. Then she reads me the English.

“Over many generations Salish peoples refined methods of preparing, spinning, and weaving mountain goat wool, dog hair, and plant fibres.
Since the late 19th century, Cowichan have combined this knowledge with knitting techniques to produce the Cowichan sweater…
Knitting has provided a source of income for families facing the challenges of colonialism…”

The plaque is signed by the Historic Sites and Monuments Board of Canada. It is the country’s first formal, physical, on-the-ground recognition of the women who made this sweater famous.

The recognition itself is dated 2011.

The Cowichan sweater is a hundred and forty years old.

The knowledge in it is much older than that.

The wool was older than the sweater.

“Feel the wool,” Cousin Duncan says.

It is heavier than I expected. Slightly oily. Warm in a way that surprises me.

“Nothing about this is new,” she says.

Before there was ever a sheep on Vancouver Island, the Coast Salish women who lived on this coast were already master textile-makers. They spun mountain-goat hair. They spun the hair of a small white domesticated dog — the Salish woolly dog, a breed the Coast Salish had raised for the purpose over many centuries. That dog is now extinct. Somebody, once, on some quiet beach on this coast, buried the last one.

They spun nettle. Cedar bark. Cattail down.

And they wove blankets. Not the kind Canadians think of. The oldest surviving Salish blankets are three to five hundred years old. They were traded up and down the coast in cedar canoes. They were given at potlatch. They were given as marriage gifts. A great Salish weaver was one of the most important people in her village.

That is not folklore. Examples still hang at the Museum of Anthropology at University of British Columbia.

The knowledge of how to prepare wool, spin it, work three natural colours, and turn it into something warm and weatherproof was already ancient here when Europeans arrived.

The knitting — the two needles, the round shape — is what came later.

How knitting arrived is more complicated than it looks.

There are two stories.

The first: in the late 1880s, a Shetland woman named Jeremina Colvin emigrated to the Cowichan Valley and taught the local women to knit in the Fair Isle style — the old Scottish craft of working geometric colour by row.

The second: in 1864, the Sisters of St. Ann — a Catholic order that had come west from Montreal — opened a school in Duncan for Indigenous girls. Knitting was part of the curriculum. It would remain part of the curriculum in residential schools across Coast Salish territory into the late 1960s.

Both stories are probably true — in different valleys, at different times.

Whatever the route in, what happened next was something new.

Coast Salish women took the European technique and made something distinctly their own. They set aside the European patterns and used the geometric motifs from the blankets their families had woven for centuries — eagles, thunderbirds, salmon, whales, deer, and older designs older than the sheep whose wool they were now using.

That is the Cowichan sweater.

A European technique in Indigenous hands, carrying an ancient Salish design, in wool an English farmer’s sheep had grown.

The sweater itself became a meeting place: old knowledge, new technique, local hands.

And then everybody wanted one.

Cousin Duncan points at a line on the plaque that mentions “the uncertainty of the post-colonial market economy.” I read it twice. Under all those syllables sits one story.

Here is what actually happened.

By the 1920s, Indian agents were sending sweaters to fairs and exhibitions as curiosities. Tourists began buying them in Duncan, Victoria and Vancouver.

In 1934 the Cowichan Leader — the local paper — quoted the Cowichan Indian agent, H. Graham. Cousin Duncan wants me to write this sentence down and read it twice.

“The increased business with the sweater has been of great assistance to the welfare of the Indians themselves, and in this way s] of indirect benefit to the Dominion Government.”

Read it twice.

I read the sentence again. The sweaters were helping Cowichan families. And the Indian agent was pleased because that also helped the government.

I put my notebook down for a moment.

I look at Cousin Duncan.

“And the women themselves?”

“Paid very little,” she says.

Middlemen took most of the margin. The Indian Act kept Cowichan knitters out of the banks, so none of them could open a shop of her own. Between sweaters, many worked the summer canneries on the Fraser or picked hops in Washington, because a sweater alone would not feed the family.

Cousin Duncan is quiet for a moment.

“I want to tell you,” she says, “the story of one of them.”

Cecelia was born in 1923.

Cousin Duncan says the name softly. Cecelia.

Her father fished in season. Between seasons, he carded wool for her mother, who spun it and knit it. Cecelia started knitting beside her mother when she was eight years old.

In 1935, when Cecelia was twelve, the family got four dollars and fifty cents for a finished sweater.

She married. She had children. Her first husband died. She was left, alone, with eight children.

She was knitting about five sweaters a week.

She told her story, decades later, to a woman named Sylvia Olsen — a European-Canadian who married into a Coast Salish family, spent thirty years on the reserve, ran a sweater shop, and eventually spent eight years writing a book about what she had seen. It is called Working with Wool. It won the Lieutenant-Governor’s Medal for Historical Writing.

Cousin Duncan hands me the book. It falls open where she has already turned down a corner. I read.

“I got left with eight kids when my first husband died. I was knitting about five sweaters a week at that time. I stayed up most of the night.
I would pack wood up from the beach for the fire. Then I would knit all night.
I always liked knitting. All the kids would go to sleep and I would knit.
We didn’t have electricity. I don’t think anybody got electricity or running water on the reserve until 1958 or 1959. We had oil lamps and if we didn’t have enough oil we would use candles.
The kids had to eat and we had to work whenever we could.”

I read it slowly.

It is a night in the 1950s. Cecelia is on the west coast of Canada. Her children are asleep. She has carried wood up from the beach for the fire. She is knitting by the light of a candle because the oil ran out.

Somewhere in a downtown Duncan shop the next morning, one of her sweaters is hanging in a window with a price tag on it. By that afternoon a couple from Seattle drives off with it as a Canadian souvenir.

That was the sweater then.

That has been the sweater ever since.

Cousin Duncan closes the book, gently.

And when Canada wanted to look Canadian in front of the world…

“Do you remember the 2010 Olympics?” Cousin Duncan asks.

I do. Vancouver was hosting the Winter Games that February. Team Canada needed a look — and Hudson’s Bay, the official outfitter, made a choice.

Hudson’s Bay designed a chunky grey-and-cream knit sweater with geometric shoulder bands. For Team Canada. For the podium. For the world to buy on their way home.

Manufactured overseas.

Two Cowichan women went on the record.

In the Times Colonist, a knitter named Emily Sawyer-Smith said the imitations were “ taking something away from what was originally owichan].”

In The Citizen, the Cowichan Tribes’ Dianne Hinkley put a dollar figure on it: “The sweaters could have had a huge economic impact on people that are living hand to mouth.”

The dispute ended in a licensing agreement — Hudson’s Bay could keep its version so long as authentic Cowichan sweaters were also carried in its stores.

It was not the first fight, though. In 1979 the Cowichan Tribes had sued a wholesaler for using the name. In 1995 they filed for a federal trademark. In 1997 it was granted. Today it is called Genuine Cowichan — and only sweaters that meet its guidelines can wear the label.

Cousin Duncan sighs. I write it down: that trademark exists because the sweater got famous enough to be stolen.

The plaque.

The light is going. Cousin Duncan and I walk back to the plaque.

Chief Sulsulxumaat — Cindy Daniels, Elected Chief of the Cowichan Tribes, spoke at the March unveiling.

“The Cowichan Sweater is distinctly Quw’utsun. Knit in one piece, by hand, it represents generations of cultural continuity at home while showcasing expert craftsmanship abroad.
For many of our families, knitting has been a financial lifeline and a powerful example of Quw’utsun entrepreneurship.
This recognition honours not only the sweater itself, but the knitters and families who have sustained this tradition, even as they have had to defend their work against illegal appropriation and imitation.”

The plaque is on Cowichan land. The Hul’q’umi’num’ comes first. That is not an accident. Elders and Knowledge Keepers worked with Cowichan Tribes and Parks Canada for years to make sure it did.

The plaque itself was installed this March.

Canada recognized the sweater in the national record in 2011.

Cecelia was knitting by candlelight in 1955.

Her mother a generation before her.

Salish women were weaving on this coast three to five hundred years before that.

We walk back through the Garry oaks. It has started to drizzle — Vancouver Island October rain, fine as breath.

The rain beads on Cousin Duncan’s sweater and rolls right off. That is because the wool is un-dyed and hand-spun with the lanolin still in it. A real Cowichan sweater, in real coastal rain, does not get wet.

Somebody figured that out, once.

Nobody wrote her name down.

“You know what the best part of the plaque is?” Cousin Duncan says.

“What?”

“That it’s in Hul’q’umi’num’ first.”

— Castor

STORYTIME WITH UNCLE CASTOR

True Canadian stories, small enough for bedtime.

Read to your kids.

Nora and Finn and the Pumpkin Boat

A true story from Windsor, Nova Scotia

On a rainy spring afternoon, Nora and Finn find an old newspaper on Grandpa’s shelf. On the front page is a photograph of Grandpa — much younger, in a life jacket, holding a paddle, sitting inside an enormous orange pumpkin.

“Grandpa,” says Nora, “is that really you?”

Grandpa smiles. “That was the Windsor Pumpkin Regatta.”

“Did you win?” asks Finn.

“By half a pumpkin,” says Grandpa.

Nora looks at Finn. Finn looks at Mom.

“We need to grow a boat.”

What follows is a summer of watering, weeding, weekly measuring — and in October, one very round orange boat, a captain who has to be taught to paddle straight, and a race day on Lake Pisiquid that finishes by half a pumpkin.

For the youngest kits · ≈ 12 min read-aloud

Read the whole story on 1000towns.ca →
Yours, from the reading chair,
— Uncle Castor

A flood of mail on Paul Henderson — with a question, a memory, and a mural.
→ The question we cannot stop asking.
Half a dozen readers wrote a version of the same sentence.

David Sword put it plainly: “And, he should TOTALLY be in the Hockey Hall of Fame!”
Jay Simpson wrote it shorter: “Should be in the hall.” Dave Miles simply: “Why isn’t he in the HOF?”

They are not alone. Paul Henderson has been made a Member of the Order of Canada. He has been inducted into Canada’s Sports Hall of Fame. He has been made a Member of the Order of Ontario. But he is not — not yet — in the Hockey Hall of Fame in Toronto.

— Castor

A Reader Writes

A flood of mail on Paul Henderson — with a question, a memory, and a mural.

→ The question we cannot stop asking.
Half a dozen readers wrote a version of the same sentence.

— Castor