Cowichan Tribes is an administrative creation stretched over something older. When the band was constituted under the Indian Act, seven distinct peoples were amalgamated into a single legal entity: Quamichan, the largest, along with Clemclemaluts, Comiaken, Khenipsen, Kilpahlas, Koksilah and Somena - Kwaʼmutsun, Lʼumlʼumuluts, Qwumʼyiqunʼ, Hinupsum, Tlʼulpalus, Hwulqwselu and Sʼamunaʼ in their own language. Their traditional territory covered the whole Cowichan Valley, Cowichan Lake and Shawnigan Lake, and reached out into the Gulf Islands and across to the Fraser River, with the heaviest settlement in the lowlands running from present-day Duncan down to Cowichan Bay. That reach was recognised early: in 1808 other nations warned the explorer Simon Fraser that the Cowichan held most of the country between the Fraser River and the open Pacific. Today the band's nine reserves total 24 square kilometres, inside a core traditional territory of roughly 3,750.

In 1858 Sisters of St. Ann travelled from Montreal to Victoria and opened a schoolhouse. Through the 1860s, knitting became part of what Indigenous girls were taught at St. Ann's Academy in Victoria and at St. Ann's School for Indian Girls in Duncan - a colonial curriculum delivered in a colonial institution. What the students did with it was their own. Coast Salish weavers already understood wool intimately, and the technique landed in hands that had been working fibre for a very long time. By the twentieth century the classic form had settled: white or undyed wool, worked in coat style, fastened with buttons or a zipper, hip-length, shawl collar, and ornamented with Indigenous or sporting motifs. It is warm to the point of impracticality indoors, which is exactly the point.

Imitation started almost immediately. Commercial firms were copying the design by the 1920s, and Mary Maxim, founded in the 1940s, built a mail-order knitting empire partly on patterns encountered during a sales trip through British Columbia. The dispute reached national television in 2009, when the Hudson's Bay Company unveiled official sweaters for the Vancouver 2010 Winter Olympics that looked unmistakably like Cowichan work. On 21 October 2009 Chief Linda Hwitsum called publicly for redress. The outcome was a compromise rather than a victory: Cowichan knitters were given space to sell their own sweaters alongside the commercial versions at the Hudson's Bay store in downtown Vancouver. The garments were side by side on the same floor, which made the difference between them visible to anyone willing to look.

The longest-running argument is about land. Cowichan families travelled seasonally to the lower Fraser River for the salmon runs, keeping villages and fishing stations there for generations before the river's mouth became Richmond, British Columbia. In August 2025, the Supreme Court of British Columbia found that Cowichan Tribes holds Aboriginal title over a portion of Lulu Island in Richmond, together with fishing rights on that stretch of the Fraser. The decision landed on some of the most heavily developed and expensive real estate on Canada's west coast, and its consequences are still being worked out - but as a finding of fact about who was there and what they held, it was unambiguous.

Cowichan Tribes is governed by an elected chief and a council of twelve, serving a total population of 5,614. Its business arm, the Khowutzun Development Corporation, runs contracting, forest services and a millwork and joinery operation, and the group's combined revenue reached $60 million as long ago as 2004. The Quwʼutsun Cultural and Conference Centre sits on the Cowichan River in Duncan and does the work of explaining the nation to visitors in its own words. The valley itself remains what drew people here in the first place: one of the warmest and driest pockets on the British Columbia coast, and among its most agriculturally generous, with a river full of salmon running through the middle of it - which is also why almost everyone else wanted it.