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

[p. 29] Land ownership. In 1915 the Quileute absorbed more knowledge concerning the difference between
white ownership of property and the traditional Indian concept that ownership continued only as
long as the property was used. For several years a number of the Quileute had been planting vegetables
on a piece of riverbottom land within the area belonging to Mr. Harvey Smith. When Mr. Smith fenced
his land and evicted the Indians for this gardening area, the Indians felt that they were wronged because
the land was not in use when they took it over. The matter was explained, but not their satisfaction. [p.
42] Under the old Indian system of land ownership no one questioned ownership so long as the land was
in use, and there has never been a shortage of building sites. Ownership of houses has been of more concern
than ownership of the land on which they were built...one gathers that the Indians see no particular
reason for a piece of paper to prove land ownership. Everybody knows who owns what anyway.
[p. 50] Agriculture and stock raising. As early as 1862, the Superintendent for Wash. Terr. expressed the
opinion that attempts to introduce agriculture on coastal reservation would not succeed because of the
great labor required to clear land and pull stumps. He estimated that it cost $150 an acre to prepare land
for planting. The country was not very suitable for grazing either, except the prairies, which were not
part of the reserves and had been first choice lands for homesteaders.....It was probable that there was
no interest in agricultural pursuits among the Quileute until after 1890, aside from gardening instruction
given to the young people at the school starting in 1881. [p. 51] For nutritional and economic reasons, the
government has made a number of attempts to introduce the raising of truck crops. A few years ago [i.e.
early ‘30s] the Indian Agent organized a community garden lot. The govt. paid the Indians to clear other
ground for it, and provided the seed. A group of five Indians agreed to operate it. For a season or two
the program was reasonably successful, but then interest began to wane. Crops did not grow as well as
they had the first year under got. Supervision and cattle or horses or deer managed to get in one way or
another. Mark Williams has continued to raise a little corn and a few potatoes because he is an old man
and, as others explain it, he has nothing to do but watch them grow. Tyler Hobucket also cultivated a
garden for a number of years, but now doesn’t attempt much because he is still sick at heart over what
happened in 1937 [a horse ate his garden in a night and precipitated a continuing community disagreement]....
Back of the Quileutes’ lack of sustained interest in agriculture, of course, lies a long history of dependence
on what nature provided in the way of plant and animal food by her own unaided efforts. The
Quileute were never expected to feed elk or deer, or cultivate the wild berries or plow the prairies, which
produced and still produce heavy crops of fern roots or camas. What advantage is there in substituting
plants and animals, which require so much labor to keep alive.
Howeattle, Mattie [1961], as quoted in the Seattle Times, Apr. 18, 1961, “Schools Needed Says Oldest
Quinault.” Mattie Howeattle was born on the Hoh River of a Hoh mother and Quileute father. She lived
in later years in Taholah, but held a potlatch in LaPush during the 1940s.
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