#DogsAreFamiky
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michellemybell.bsky.social
I was just hanging out with my dog Ash today. He is a sweet and friendly dog .
#DogsAreFamiky #ILoveMyDog #DogMom #labpitmix #BlackDogsAreAwesome #MyBestfriend #doggo #dog
Ashhe is a Labrador Pitbull mix and I just hanging out on the couch
June 25, 2025 at 4:02 AM
dogshistorian.bsky.social
About Salish wool #dogs and their extinction in 19th century, what i wrote and think in my next book #MIGRATIONS
#dogsarefamiky #archaeology #nativeamericans #history #art #evolution
My books deal with reconstructing the evolutionary history of dogs and humans, touching on the social and cultural aspects, but events often lead me to delve deeper into these topics. For the studies of the new book MIGRATIONS that I'm writing now, I have already posted a couple of times about the wool dogs of the Malah and Salish peoples; but why did they become extinct at the end of the 19th century? Some have hypothesized in a rather simplistic way that it was due to the massive trade in industrial blankets in the area (and elsewhere). The reality is quite different and is the result of yet another episode of colonialism carried out by the 'pale faces' against the natives. First of all, the exploitation of gold deposits starting from the mid-19th century brought tens of thousands of people to the area, who brought with them diseases (tuberculosis, smallpox, etc.) to which the natives were not immune and this caused a reduction important part of the population 1/3 (in some villages it reached 90% in a few decades). Secondly, the unscrupulous behavior of the Catholic priests who forced the local populations to catechize in the name of a "benevolent" God to the detriment of local habits and customs, with the relative relegation of Salish women to roles of no value, women who for millennia had the responsibility of raising, looking after and shearing their dogs, in families who lived with those dogs as happens in our families today. Furthermore, a large part of the local indigenous people were deported elsewhere in the name of soil and subsoil exploitation. In this way it happened, forcibly, no one cared about these dogs anymore and they disappeared from history. One of the last representatives of this docile breed with at least 5,000 years of history was the dog named Mutton, donated in 1858 by the Salish to the ethnographer George Gibbs who, 2/3 when his dog died a few years later, Gibbs kept some of its remains: the fur and some bones today observable at the Burke Museum of Natural History and Culture (with other objects made of dog wool from the Salish people) in Seattle (WA). Did it all happen for the blanket trade? What happened was much more serious and shameful. 3/3
February 5, 2024 at 7:21 PM