Above is an example of the Cowichan sweater, photo courtesy Cowichan Tribes. The Cowichan tribes are part of the coastal Salish Nation, long renowned for their fine weaving, so it’s not surprising the Cowichan people quickly adapted their own designs to the knitting they learned from white settlers. The Cowichan sweater is unique in that it has a collar and was traditionally knit all in one piece, and while nowadays the sweaters sometimes have a heavy metal zipper, they’re otherwise unchanged. Many sweaters have traditional Salish motifs on front and back, often killer whale, salmon, eagles or deer. I grew up with one of these – a proper pullover one with no seams – and many British Columbians would have had a similar one. The wool is not dyed – darker sheep produce the dark brown and grey wool for the designs. Natural lanolin is left in the wool so that the sweaters shed water in the wet BC climate. These sweaters show up in popular culture all the time, though most of them are cheap knockoffs – to a British Columbian eye, the ones in The Big Lebowski and Starsky and Hutch are obvious fakes. Updated designs are fine, but it’s the quality and weight of the wool that counts; the fibres should be natural in colour, not dyed; and banded arms with traditional Salish weaving patterns.

Since it’s one of the most iconic BC designs it seemed fitting that a custom-designed Cowichan sweater would be proposed for the Olympics, as part of the giant merchandising circus we’ve been subjected to here in BC for the past few years. Well-known Cowichan knitter Emily Sawyer-Smith, above, produced the Olympic design sweater you can see being presented below to BC’s premier Gordon Campbell, at left, and Jacques Rogges, IOC president, at right. This actually seemed like a great development but to the shock of many, and despite the fact that the well-organized Cowichan bands had assembled enough knitters to supply the Olympics with these sweaters, The Hudson’s Bay department store created controversy by claiming the Cowichan knitters’ output would be too small and instead having odd faux Cowichan sweaters made for their official line of 2010 Olympic clothing - in China. (Photo at bottom). However, despite that fact that the public considers The Bay’s sweater to be a “cowichan,” The Bay claims it is not – and in some ways it’s right. Many however still consider their design to be theft. More here about the conflict over trademark and cultural property, and you can also read about the meeting held between the Bay and the Cowichan band here. In the end, after threats of Olympic relay disruptions and a lot of media coverage, an accommodation was reached at the end of October – real Cowichan sweaters will be sold at two Olympic pavilions as well as at the Hudson’s Bay. But the story doesn’t end there for First Nations art at the Olympics, where many other imported art objects are being sold as “authentic aboriginal art” and are edging out true First Nations art. See that story here.

Above is the weird hybrid knockoff being sold at the Hudson’s Bay Company as an official 2010 Olympics souvenir. It clearly references the Cowichan sweater, but it has the look of those mass-produced curling sweaters (often with belts), and its wool is dyed, unlike the wool in an authentic Cowichan. Maroon is just wrong. While there is no completely standard design for these sweaters – they are after all a culturally hybrid product – the above knockoff seems poor on many levels, and as a British Columbian I’m a bit embarrassed that this is how the world is going to see our craft and design. What was the Hudson’s Bay Co. thinking? For successful innovations in Cowichan designs , Emily Sawyer-Smith’s Olympic rings design is great, and so is CBC broadcaster Grant Lawrence’s sweater, below. Further below is Canadian WWII officer Cecil Merritt in a Cowichan sweater sent to him by relatives in Vancouver – he’s photographed here in a Nazi prisoner of war camp along with fellow officers.

For more discussion on the sweater and its appropriation, see KnowBC and UBCWiki. Authentic Cowichan sweaters can be found at places like Authentic Cowichan Indian Knits, 424 W. 3rd St, North Vancouver, 604-988-4735, or online from individual makers, like this. Below is a somewhat odd pair of sweaters, given the fraught historical relationship of the church to First Nations (photo from Wikipedia by Marg Miekle):

The above location is about 2 blocks north of where I live and work, and if you walk down to the water another 7 or 8 blocks to the northwest, you’re standing on the birthplace of Vancouver. The Hastings Mill was built there in the late 19th century. Lumbermen skidded their logs to the mill along a “corduroy” road made of timbers and logs greased with fish oil. That road traveled along the stretch of Hastings Street that you see here and then down Dunlevy Street, as it’s known today. The road was lined with cheap shacks and hotels and is the origin of the term “skid row,” a distinction that I’m sure must give Vancouverites a sense of civic pride. Today Hastings Street frightens visitors from New York, but it’s not particularly unsafe as long as you’re uninvolved in its local economies; it just looks disturbing because it’s the headquarters of drug use, homelessness and prostitution. The city has continued to try to contain and concentrate those things here since the early 60s, so it’s just getting worse. That’s the Astoria Hotel there in the photo, with its relatively traumatizing beer-and-wine store and a bar that’s suddenly gone hipster and one of the best neon signs in the city and you can’t cross Hastings to buy a cheap bottle of wine there without getting propositioned by johns. I mean if you’re a girl. The empty lot to the right of the hotel has been sitting unused for years and is now, amazingly, going to the be the site of United We Can’s “SOLEfood” Urban Farm, below. It’s an excellent project and I’m volunteering to dig. Come by on Saturday! More info here, news story here and in the Globe and Mail.

You can see downtown Vancouver in the semi-distance at left. If you just keep walking west along Hastings for 15 minutes, you’re there. The mountains that you can see are north and northwest. Thank goodness for Google Street View, because it’s raining and I didn’t want to walk over and taken my own photos of this corner.

Graphic design isn’t usually my focus, but when you’re interested in design and are living amidst the deluge of an impending Olympics in your hometown, the tide of graphics is impossible to ignore. Here’s a small sample of political cartoons and posters that incorporate the various Olympic logos – the standard logo with the five rings, as well as the Vancouver 2010 “Inukshuk” logo. (For controversy about the Inukshuk logo see here.) Above is Corey Rollins’ poster about Vancouver’s famous drug and prostitution problem (at left), which is based on the official Vancouver 2010 logo (at right). Rollins also did the healthcare poster below, and the taser shirt too, I think, but I’m having trouble verifying that. I’ll add more graphics to this post as I collect them, just in order to keep them all in once place, so check back if you’re interested. The issues being addressed in these graphics, as you can see, are homelessness and eviction, Vancouver’s infamous drug problem (which is sort of headquartered a few blocks from the stadiums and Olympic village, not to mention my studio), appropriation of First Nations’ imagery and land, environmental destruction, corporate/real estate development, debt, police action, suppression of free speech (Google “Free Speech Zones”), corporate perq’s and all of the other problems that generally accompany an Olympic Games. Being saddled with an Olympics during an economic downturn is no doubt increasing Vancouver’s level of unrest even further. Before you imagine that these are all overreactions, consider this: there is BC legislation waiting to be passed that could mean a 10,000 fine and/or jail time for anyone putting up an anti-Olympics sign in the window of his/her own house, under which law police will have the right to enter your home and remove it. I’ve even had elderly women tell me they’re so incensed that they’re planning to put a sign up too. In a surprising and much-appreciated move, though, the Vancouver police (who are really in need of good PR) held a press conference two days ago announcing that they will not enter any house to remove a sign nor will they lay charges. This will win them a lot of fans. Almost all of these graphics were found here. For a post on the official 2010 graphics on this blog, see here. NOTE: I’m not sure why people conclude that political cartoons equal violent protest. They don’t, and it seems to go without saying that trying to repress them stands a much better chance of causing violence than allowing them.

The flag above was produced by artist Kathryn Walter back when Toronto was bidding (unsuccessfully) for a summer Olympics. The artist recently donated the flag to one of the non-profit art centres in Vancouver that has had its funding abruptly cut by the provincial government, just prior to the Olympics. The government has claimed that the Olympic debt has nothing to do with the recent radical cuts to cultural funding in BC but there are doubts. Projected economic benefits of the Games have this year been downgraded from approx 10 billion to just under 4 billion [update - 1 billion], while the cost of the Olympics leapt from 3 or 4 billion to 7 or more billion. For a small province of only 4 million people, that’s a big debt to be carrying, especially on top of the recession-related deficit of billions we were already burdened with.

Above are the 3 Olympic mascots: Sumi, Quaatchi and Miga. Below is a graphic from the Poverty Olympics, “Give 2010 the finger.”

The four political cartoons immdiately below are from the No2010 site – not sure who the artist is. The 5 interconnected handcuffs motif has actually appeared at prior Olympics as well, including Torino and the Chicago bid.

Above, image by Gord Hill, Kwakwaka’wakw & Riel Manywounds, TsuuT’ina/Nak’azdli, June 2007. Below, Wolves by Ange Sterrit, Gitxsan.