A stitch in time

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This article was published 02/10/2023 (977 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

An October chill is in the air, which means it’s sweater weather.

Fortunately, Winnipeg-based filmmaker Mary Galloway has an extraordinary hand-knit sweater to keep her warm. And it’s a warmth that transcends the insulating properties of sheep’s wool. It’s a comfort born of her family, of the Vancouver Island community of her birth and of the history that weaves them all together.

Galloway’s sweater has a starring role in her 44-minute documentary The Cowichan Sweater: Our Knitted Legacy, which premières Friday on the free streaming service CBC Gem.

Galloway, 33, lives in Winnipeg’s West End, and is of Cowichan and mixed settler descent. She was initially asked to make the film at the request of Ron Rice, the director of the Victoria Native Friendship Centre.

“He wanted to help draw attention to the community of Salish knitters,” Galloway says. “It was originally set up to be a short commercial; they were looking for a Cowichan director and my name came up.”

As it happens, Galloway got her start in film and television as an actor, and quickly moved to directing on series such as Querencia (2021) and the upcoming second season of Winnipeg comedian Paul Raubliaskas’s sitcom Acting Good, as well as many short films.

“I was born and raised on Vancouver Island and I moved to the Lower Mainland for about nine years and that’s where I started my film career,” Galloway says, tucking her sweater beside her, safely out of the splash zone of the chilled kombucha tea she’s sipping at Bonnie Day restaurant in Wolseley.

“And then I moved to L.A., and as soon as I moved, I started getting all this work in Canada, in Winnipeg. It was blowing up there,” she says. “I worked here three times in 2018. (One of the projects was a starring role in Madison Thomas’s feature film Ruthless Souls. Later she would work as a writer on the series Burden of Truth.)

The Cowichan project drew her back home. Galloway quickly made a connection with the project through her grandfather, the late chief Dennis Alphonse. She had an old black-and-white photograph of Alphonse dressed in a distinctive Cowichan sweater. The crux of the film became her quest to have a sweater made for her with the same design.

‘It became the documentary that it is now, and I incorporated the story of my grandfather into it,” she says.

“I came up with the whole finished film with the intention of supporting and shining a light on the community and uplifting them as much as we can, and teaching people about Cowichan sweaters,” she says. “People see them all around the globe, but they not everyone knows where they come from. And they should get the respect that they deserve.”

The Cowichan sweater has been around for more than a century, and knitting them was an adaptation of the older weaving culture of the Cowichan people, a crucial way for women to make a living at a time when the culture was under a colonial assault of exclusion and isolation.

For Galloway, the way the story of the Cowichan sweater paralleled the story of Indigenous people in Canada was illuminating.

“I never knew to what extent they go back, and I couldn’t quite understand the gravitas, the importance of them, and how special they are,” she says.

“Yet they’ve always been in my life. I’ve always seen them on family members in my mom’s community in Duncan, B.C., where the reservation is for Cowichan people. I may have taken them for granted.

“But when I made this film, I could really understand how much hard work it has been, and how it survived through all these hard things. I’ve grown to respect them a good deal more than when I started out.”

But it was also a way to reconnect with her late grandfather, who died when Galloway was around 13.

“I always knew he was extraordinary, just as a human being, but I didn’t know how extraordinary he was in the community,” she says. “When you’re a kid, your grandpa is your grandpa. You don’t know what your grandfather’s impact on the community has been until you get older.”

In the film, we see octogenarian Dora Wilson, a revered Cowichan elder, praise Alphonse, a moment Galloway says will stay with her.

“Dora Wilson, one of the most respected knitters, saying he was the most, even the greatest chief ever, that sentence will stick with me for the rest of my life,” she says. “When I’m down and out and trying to do big projects and lead a whole group of people, I want to channel my grandfather’s energy and his strength, follow in his footsteps as best as I can.”

Galloway hopes that the film will also compel people to seek out authentic Cowichan sweaters when they go to purchase them in a market riddled with knockoffs.

“When people are looking to buy a sweater, the best way to go about it is go direct from the knitters,” she says. “It’s so important that people go directly to Salish knitters in established territory, and that they pay a fair market value.

“Right now, a fair price to pay for a Cowichan sweater would be $750 to $900,” she says. “I paid $1,000 for my sweater. And it will last 100 years.”

randall.king.arts@gmail.com