10/05/2026
Coast Salish wool skirts and woven wool garments connected to the Tulalip/Snohomish peoples and the broader Salish Sea, there is a much deeper story than simply “taking care of a wool skirt.”
🧶 The garment carries the work of the weaver
A wool skirt or other woven garment represents many hands and many kinds of knowledge—gathering, cleaning, preparing, spinning, dyeing, weaving, and caring for the finished piece.
The contemporary Coast Salish Wool Weaving Center describes weaving as a way of preserving ancestral teachings, stories, memory, and cultural knowledge. One of the current weavers involved in the Burke Museum’s Woven in Wool exhibition, Tulalip’s teeweewas Tillie Jones, is part of that continuing tradition.
So when someone carefully folds, stores, repairs, or cleans a wool garment, they’re not simply protecting fabric.
They’re caring for something that carries knowledge.
🌿 Why traditional care matters
For a significant or ceremonial wool skirt, I would think about care in three ways:
1. Care for the wool
Avoid unnecessary washing, harsh chemicals, excessive heat, and rough handling. Wool can be damaged by improper cleaning. For an especially important handwoven piece, professional textile conservation or guidance from an experienced Coast Salish weaver is preferable to treating it like an ordinary wool garment.
2. Care for the weaving
Don’t pull at loose fibers or ribbons, and don’t hang a heavy woven piece in a way that puts stress on the fabric. Store it clean, dry, protected from insects, and away from prolonged sunlight.
3. Care for what it represents
This is perhaps the most important part. A culturally significant piece shouldn’t be treated as disposable fashion. If it becomes damaged, repairing and preserving it can itself be an act of respect.
Coast Salish weavers today speak about bringing garments and weaving traditions back so that people can once again wear them, give them away, and use them in ceremony.
❤️ And there’s a beautiful connection to Tulalip
Tulalip teachings emphasize following and upholding the teachings passed down by ancestors.
That makes caring for a wool skirt more than “keep your clothes nice.”
It’s closer to:
“Take care of what was entrusted to you, because it carries something that came before you—and you may be the person who carries it forward.”
One important distinction: not every wool skirt worn by a Tulalip or Coast Salish woman is necessarily a traditional ancestral garment. Contemporary skirts can combine Indigenous design, modern fabric, and personal expression. The specific meaning belongs to the maker and wearer. The historical Coast Salish tradition is particularly well documented in woven robes, blankets, tunics, belts, and other wool garments, including skirts in contemporary weaving exhibitions.
