Threads That Bind: The Story of the Pacific Northwest Woolly Dog

For thousands of years, Indigenous women in the Pacific Northwest kept the “woolly dog” whose hair was used in traditional weaving of ceremonial blankets and robes. Due to colonial repression, the dog wool-weaving tradition was prohibited, and the woolly dog went extinct. Recently, researchers at the Smithsonian sequenced the woolly dog’s genome to understand its ancestry and genetic makeup.