The Ozette Prairies of Olympic National Park - Natural Resources ...

to the sky and tried to obtain the right medicine, such as baby lizards, baby suckers and baby squirrels.
(5:30)
Hal George told that “people used to carry pretty stones or a bone or shell they found where they had
good luck. They also carried a little carving of their spirit guardian if it was something they’d seen like a
little elk with great big horns” (NB 1978.1, p.40).
Personal Cleanliness - Personal cleanliness was especially important to traditional Quileute. Hal George
expressed it like this: “Bathing was important, especially when you wanted to get in a right relationship
to your spirit power. Scrub your body with fine sand and then coarse until it bleeds. Spirits don’t like
unclean people and won’t come around. They wouldn’t come near you if you weren’t really clean, in
your heart and outside. Lucky people were always scrubbing in streams” (NB 1978.1, p.47). Hal used to
bathe before going hunting. We can see how this practice related to subsistence activities, since a hunter
or gatherer’s success was so clearly related to the help of that person’s taxilit ‘spirit power’.
Summary: Traditional Quileute Perspective on Prairie Stewardship Obligation. For traditional Quileute,
then, we can suggest that stewardship behavior would be appropriate actions and activities that maintain
the prairies and allow them to be exploited without waste or disrespect that would offend the spirits.
This attentiveness to ingratiating the spirit world as a factor in traditional Quileute folk science leaves me
uncertain as to the logic behind stewardship activities in the prairies. It is clear that the old people were
aware of the cause and effect relationship of regular burning to keeping the prairies open. The question is
whether they were primarily motivated by this realization of useful ecological cause and effect or whether
the focal motivation was spiritual. An example might help clarify the distinction.
In 1968, I was invited to go out collecting seagull eggs by Hal George and Harvey James, two old men
who had been to school but who were taLayikila potsoqw, ‘oldtime people.’ We went by outboard boat,
pulling a canoe to an island south of La Push. Reaching the island, where hundreds of seagulls were nesting,
Hal and Harvey got out and, talking appeasingly to the seagulls that were angrily screeching and
diving at them, they walked around the island and stepped on every egg on the island…crunch, crunch,
crunch. Then we got back in the boat and went to Queets for two days, visiting friends of Hal’s. On the
morning of the third day, we went back to the island and, after singing a song of praise to T’siq’ati, collected
every egg on the island until the canoe that we were pulling behind was full of eggs. When I asked
the men, “Why do you break all the eggs?” Their response was that by breaking the eggs first is the only
way that they can be sure that the eggs they actually collect are fresh. But, when I persisted, “There won’t
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