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

you waste what you are given, you won’t get as much as you need next time. We say, Wa t’akw dokwlita
(Don’t waste [said to a woman]) and my gramma told me that again and again when I was a girl
(NB1993-4, p.62).
2) We only take as much as we need. When I’m going out, I always have a little prayer for guidance to
go here and there and do this and that. It’s possible that …you could take too much and be wasteful and
ruin it for everybody or the kids could get sick (NB 1978, p.89).
3) We never waste like the hokwat’ (lit. ‘drifting house people,’ Euro-Americans, were called that because
their sailing ships were thought to be drifting houses by the early Quileute). That’s the reason that our
people are so lucky. T’siq’ati knows that we are good people to be caught by.
However, as we mentioned above, the traditional concept of “only what is needed” may include amounts
sufficient to allow ceremonial or personal generosity on a dramatic scale. Furthermore, there appears to
have been a traditional assumption that the spirit world would make it clear how much was needed by
causing fish, animals, plantlife, and materials to make themselves available to Quileute in the amounts
that were really needed. An example is the following, paraphrased in fieldnotes from an account by Hal
George:
Fish and animals, especially sea mammals (seals and whales) and elk give themselves to men in the
quantity that they are really needed. Old man Harold Johnson, Ta’axawil, told him that when he was
young he was hunting and a bunch of elk just came up and looked at him. He shot one, and then he shot
another and then another. They didn’t move. And he knew that they were sent by his Kit’lakwal (Elkdance
society) spirit. So he shot them all. He used that meat to give a big naming feast for his nephews,
to get them initiated into the elk song society, Kit’lakwal. (Powell, NB 1978:19)
Contemporary Quileute speak nowadays of taking only as much as is needed, implying or overtly claiming
that this was done to avoid a negative impact on the environment by over-fishing, over-hunting or
over-harvesting. They suggest that this conservation-approach was followed by the old people, as well.
However, Old Man Fred Woodruff once attempted to clarify the difference between contemporary and
traditional Quileute views as follows:
These guys (current Quileute young people) are always talking about culture. They don’t know about
culture. In the old times there was so much of everything we never thought about taking too much. We
filled up a wagon full of ya’likala (razor clams), and when it was full we got another wagon. We filled up
the smelt nets until the canoes sank. But, when we took something, we used it or gave it away or sold it.
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