Washington has a rich history that intertwines with the artistry and functionality of fiber arts, particularly with weaving in different natural mediums. Our state’s abundant natural resources, from vast forests to the lush pastures of its rural regions, have made it an ideal setting for the development of textile traditions. Materials such as the wool from mountain goats, cattail fluff, and waterfowl down, played a crucial role in the lives of Indigenous people, early settlers, and later communities. The Coast Salish people and other native tribes, used fibers from other plants as well, plants like cedar and fireweed, to craft functional items and woven garments, representing both cultural significance and ingenuity. With the arrival of European settlers in the 19th century, sheep’s wool became available and soon after, an essential resource in the region’s economy. The craft of weaving expanded, fueling local industries, from blankets to garments, and supporting trade networks. Over time, Washington’s fiber arts became a symbol of both tradition and innovation, with modern-day artists continuing to preserve and adapt these techniques. Today, fiber arts and hand weaving stand as key elements of Washington’s cultural identity and economic history, linking the state’s past to its ongoing creative and agricultural practices.Today I’m sitting here today with Susan Pavel Ph.D, renowned expert of Coast Salish weaving and faculty here at Evergreen to talk about the fiber arts program offered on our campus. Susan teaches a variety of fiber arts classes, some of which make up the Fiber Arts: Sheep to Shawl certificate. Throughout this certificate program, students are taught all aspects to complete a woven shawl. From shearing the sheep and preparing the wool for spinning to dyeing the yarn and weaving the fibers into ornate shawls, this certificate program covers it all. Some indigenous teachings will be shared and some will be modern methods of fiber processing.
CPJ: Susan, you have been weaving for thirty years now, you’ve exhibited in twelve museum exhibits, twenty-five gallery exhibits, and been awarded seventeen artist-in-residence or grant opportunities. Can you tell me how weaving has impacted you?
Dr. Pavel: I wanted an easy way to talk about the spirit of something. To just be straight to the punch. I wanted to live a spiritual life. In this human realm you can’t just start talking about spirituality. You can’t just go right in can ask, who’s your God? Where are you spiritually grounded? That’s not a very good opening line. But if you can talk about something else, like weaving, then you have something that is in entity that’s between two human beings or more. Now we have a platform and a foundation to stand on and from there because it’s so utterly embedded, because the spirit of it is so utterly intertwined and woven in, that it is an easy way for me to talk to everyone then about the spirit of something inside the weaving. So, it gave me a platform to talk about it. It’s powerful. It is, and very satisfying.
CPJ: The Burke Museum and the National Endowment for the Humanities grant have come together to support an exhibit of the Coast Salish Regalia, featuring some of your work. Do you know when this will be displayed?
Dr. Pavel: Yes, the confirmed opening is September 13th, 2025, and it will be open all the way through August of 2026. Take all of your classes, your friends, families, and communities. It’s going to be amazing. The Burke is one of the leading organizations with regard to being a museum that is working with native people in a good way. The information is collective, we’ve been in a collaborative venture where we meet once a month, and we’ve designed this exhibit so that it’s embedded and anchored in community voices, and the native people’s voice versus the collector or the person who works at the museum who puts on the exhibit and shares information, from a non-native perspective or a collector’s perspective. When explorers went out into the world, they looked for things and collected a mass collection of something like two hundred items, it’s called the Heye collection. It’s not called, this item woven by this person from a certain tribe, there’s no identification of the artists and sometimes not even the tribe or place that they came from. So, there’s a real paradigm shift in that way to acknowledge and anchor the voice of the people whose items it belongs to and represents.
CPJ: What do you want people visiting the exhibit to walk away with?
Dr. Pavel: That it’s a sacred endeavor, and that we are alive and well and doing the work. It’s not a bygone, it’s not in the past, it’s not dead and gone, it’s alive and well and it’s thriving in our communities and that people are absolutely reclaiming their life ways, it is breathing oxygen and air back into our ceremonies, our ways of life, and you know furthermore by my teaching it here I create educational opportunities for people to understand our Salish people, to understand the land that the Evergreen State College sits on, to understand what was already here before any of us ever came. And it is, it’s still here. My master teacher Bruce Miller would say it’s still here. You just have to look for it. You have to find it but it’s all still here.
CPJ: What are your hopes and dreams for the program here at Evergreen, or even professionally, what’s next?
Dr. Pavel: Some of it is external to Evergreen, but the intention is that our students can get to go there and see not only the exhibit [The Burke Museum Exhibit], but the ones who are interested in behind the scenes can see what it takes to put on an exhibit, what it takes to be in a relationship with native communities doing artwork like this. There’s so many possibilities. But that exhibit will come up then it’ll be taken down, so in the broader scope I’m deeply interested in sustainable fashion, regenerative agriculture, but with regard to clothing. Where do our clothes come from? This is an increasing conversation that people are having. There’s lots of people doing that work. But that’s the research I want to start leaning into, classes I would like to start offering up.
Dr. Pavel: My hope is to expand the curriculum to include coordinated studies with things like physics. Spring quarter collaborating with Pyxie Star to offer the course Patterns: The Weaving of Mathematics, and that’s exciting to me because I wanted to do this for years. I think that our students and people in general know math at an intuitive level but then we put some other languages in it and it’s like we don’t understand this other language called math. But if you strip that away and you put someone in front of a loom, their eyes and their body and their natural inclination is “I know how to do this.” From that point, you introduced a thing called math. You can see it, you can feel it and you can manipulate it in real time. And I think that math then isn’t so scary and is understandable.
Let alone the very original materials, which is the botany, or the ethnobotany or the biology of plants and animals. And why this fiber makes a better fiber for spinning and why it makes it warm. That conversation is endless. It’s endless and so that natural inclination to work with another person who has another language and myself who has the fiber language, working together makes for a very dynamic classroom and the students get it.
CPJ: Do you have a favorite piece or a piece that you feel represents Coast Salish weaving well? Maybe a piece that tells a story? To be pictured accompanying this story?
Dr. Pavel: That would be the piece that’s at the Seattle Art Museum. Her name is du’kwxaxa’t3w3l which means sacred change for each other. She is a fully twined mountain goat wool weaving that took fourteen years to weave and twelve years to gather enough wool and another two years for me to process it, dye it, spin it, and then weave it. We had an entire ceremony to unveil it here in 2006, that included more than seven local tribes. That piece has a lot to teach us and a lot to say still. It vibrates and talks and teaches us and has laid groundwork for all sorts of things that happened as a result of her being unveiled and coming to life. No one had woven something like that in over 150 years, not from mountain goat wool, not fully twined.
Thank you, Susan, for sharing the gift of art, craft, and story with us today.
