According to the 2003 Convention for the Safeguarding of the Intangible Cultural Heritage, the intangible cultural heritage (ICH) – or living heritage – is the mainspring of humanity's cultural diversity and its maintenance a guarantee for continuing creativity. It is defined as follows:

    Intangible Cultural Heritage means the practices, representations, expressions, knowledge, skills – as well as the instruments, objects, artefacts and cultural spaces associated therewith – that communities, groups and, in some cases, individuals recognize as part of their cultural heritage. This intangible cultural heritage, transmitted from generation to generation, is constantly recreated by communities and groups in response to their environment, their interaction with nature and their history, and provides them with a sense of identity and continuity, thus promoting respect for cultural diversity and human creativity.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intangible_Cultural_Heritage

http://web.ub.ca/okanagan/ccgs/faculty/younging.html

Returning to the other issue, if indications of spinning and weaving are considered important indicators that confirm the presence of the Vikings on the east side of North America (i.e., as found on Northern Baffin Island), then by the same token evidence of spinning and weaving in the Pacific Northwest must surely be just as important, if not more so. It is now well known that Norse spindle whorls were found at Brattahlid on the west coast of Greenland and the Viking Site at L'Anse Aux Meadows in Newfoundland. What seems to be less universally known, however, is that pre-Columbian spinning and weaving also occurs in the Pacific Northwest--including the area suggested for the location of "Vinland," i.e., the Cowichan Valley, land of the Cowichan and Coast Salish peoples.

Starting with the far northwest, Tlingit territory extends down from the Yakatut area to the suggested "Helluland" location around Etolin and Wrangell Islands. "Markland" lies further south on the Queen Charlotte Islands (the home of the Haida) while directly east lies Tsimshian territory. "Vinland" is located in the southeast corner of Vancouver Island, the home of the Cowichan and Coast Salish. The territory of the Musqueam is on the mainland to the east. With these divisions in mind we turn next to the use of dog wool in Pacific Northwest weaving.

THE HAIR OF THE COAST SALISH DOG
Who taught "Salish weaving" to the Cowichan girl mentioned in the excerpt from the The Daughters of Copper Woman remains unknown. Nevertheless, the reference to the use of dog wool by Hilary Stewart clearly leads back to the Coast Salish prior to the introduction of sheep into the region, i.e., Elizabeth Lominska Johnson and Kathryn Bernick record that:

Ed Sparrow is the only Musqueam elder who remembers seeing the preparation and weaving of wool. When he was five or six years old, in about 1904, he watched Thellaiwhaltun's wife with Selisya and his grandmother, Spahquia, doing this. At that time he did not realize that they were making the blanket that would be used on the floor at his naming ceremony. The fibre they used was mountain goat wool. He remembers being told in the past they had dogs with long hair which hung down from their bellies...The loom which he remembers had two cross-bars. It did not stand upright, but instead leaned against a wall of the shed where the women worked. It was seven or eight feet tall, and so they had to stand on a box to work. Its width was about three and one-half feet, but he remembers seeing weavings on Vancouver Island which were fifteen to twenty feet wide. (Elizabeth Lominska Johnson, and Kathryn Bernick, Hands of Our Ancestors: The Revival of Salish Weaving at Musqueam, Museum Note No.16, UBC Museum of Anthropology, Vancouver 1988:26)

As Reg Ashwell explains, although associated with spinning and weaving in this cultural context the dogs themselves remain something of a mystery:

Little has been recorded about the Northwest Coast Indians' dogs.. According to reports of early travelers, the dogs had the appearance of coyotes. They were highly trained by their masters, who called them by their name, treated them like respected members of the family, and according to tales old Indians tell, even sang to them. The dogs were trained to enter the woods and chase the game out to the hunter. The Coast Salish used them particularly for driving mountain goats into ambush and for herding deer and elk into lakes, where they could be attacked and slain by men in canoes.
What breed were these dogs? They have mixed long since with the pets of white settlers and reliable identification is no longer possible. Perhaps students interested in dog history will one day attempt to unravel the mystery of their origins... Coast Salish women, utilizing a simple loom, wove in wool--a practice uncommon in North America since the continent was not well-supplied with wool-bearing animals until after the introduction of sheep by white men. In addition, the Puget Sound women had their own little wool-bearing animal--a tame dog, quite small, but with a thick coat of creamy wool which could be shorn at regular intervals. When the wool was hacked off with a mussel shell knife, the fleece was so thick that according to one historian you could lift it up by one corner, like a mat. The Coast Salish also utilized the wool of the mountain goat. The Salish Indians along the Fraser River sometimes hunted the goats and traded the hides to the Coast. They also searched over the hillsides in spring and summer, when the goats were shedding, and gathered the tufts of fur which rubbed off on the bushes as the animals passed by. Perhaps it was this gift of wool which inspired Salish women to begin weaving cloth. Early explorers describe the dogs as having the appearance of Pomeranians, usually white in color, but sometimes varying to a brownish black. They were usually kept on tiny islands in Puget Sound and the Straits of Juan de Fuca and were not found among the more northerly Indians of the Northwest Coast. The women would paddle out daily from the village with food and drink for the dogs and always took them along with them during prolonged absences from the village on food gathering trips and other necessary excursions. A woman's wealth was said to have been judged by the number of dogs she owned. Captain George Vancouver reported meeting a group of two hundred Indians, most of them in canoes, but a few walking along with a drove of about forty dogs, which were sheared close to the skin like sheep.
The opening of the Hudson's Bay trading posts and the subsequent appearance of the easily obtainable Hudson's Bay blankets spelled the death knell for the weaving of these beautiful Salish blankets and mantles, only a few of which survive today in museums and private collections.
With the coming of the gold rush in 1858 and the resultant drastic changes in Coast Salish life styles, the dogs were no longer a valuable commodity and soon became extinct. Today there is not an Indian living who even remembers how they looked.
The wool of the dogs was much finer than that of the goats, and the yarns produced from it were very much like those of a fine grade commercial wool. The shearing was sometimes repeated two or three times in a summer and even then it was hard to get wool enough for many blankets. Women would mix the dog wool with mountain goat wool and together with goose down or duck down and the cotton from the fireweed and other plants, in any proportions available. Clay beaten into the wool with a flat, sword-like piece of wood helped remove the grease from the wool and also whitened it, for dog wool was not so white as the wool of the mountain goat. Next the weaver combed the fibers out with her fingers or hand carders and then rolled them on her leg. The wool was then ready for spinning. The spindle used was a smooth stick three of four feet long. At is lower end was a whorl of carved wood (often beautifully decorated), to keep the strands from slipping.
The loom for weaving the yarn consisted of two horizontal rollers supported in slots cut in wooden uprights set in the ground. Although not always used, the alternate strands of the warp were often keep apart by a simple heddle of thin wood to allow the hand to pass through. The warp was run around these rollers in a series of continuous cords so that the web could frequently be pulled around to a convenient position for the weaver, who always wove from the top downward. (Reg Ashwell, Coast Salish, Their Art, Culture and Legends, Hancock House, Surrey, 1978:50-62, emphases supplied).

Although the dogs mentioned above may have become extinct or disappeared through interbreeding, one thing remains clear enough, namely that Coast Salish weaving clearly predates the arrival of post-Columbian Europeans on the West Coast. It seems necessary to emphasize this point because although priest Lempfrit had been removed from the Cowichan Valley in 1852 (see Part III: Three Steps Back), the Church nevertheless returned there after the 1862-1863 smallpox epidemic and from that time on a movement towards knitting rather than weaving per se appears to have taken place in the Valley, i.e., Prior to the 1850s, when the first European settlers arrived in the Duncan area, the Cowichan people had been in contact with settlers in Fort Victoria and Sooke... Roman Catholic and Anglican Missions began visiting in the 1850s and took up residency in the following decade. Before European contact the Coast Salish people wove blankets, leggings, and rumplines (burden straps) out of mountain goat wool, dog hair, and other fibres. The wool was spun with a spindle and whorl, and the blankets were woven on a two-bar loom. There is little information on pre-contact production and use of these weavings, although examples remain in museum collections...

Also someone remarked about this issue:

"Furthermore, it's appauling to hear that "one third of royalties from its aboriginal product line will go to an Aboriginal Youth Legacy Fund to support education, sport and culture". This is insulting. At least I find this offensive. It's almost racist and most definitely discriminatory. Imagine this scenario (in which I have been a witness of). A customer who's causing a disturbance at a coffee shop interacts with an employee. The employee happens to be of african decent. She says this to her in anger "I can't believe you are refusing me. I have donated to Africa. I have paid for schools, water, and medicine for your people!"