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

capable of holding four or more families. The hunting and fishing grounds were owned by the family or
by the household. [p. 112] There were some other kinds of property which were owned by the individual
family. The prairies were such examples. The private ownership of prairies was based on the principle
that a person owned whatever he had made or improved by means of labor. Each family had a part of
a prairie where its members could go to dig roots. The prairies were burnt and weeds were kept under
control by means of fire. All of these acts involved labor. Hunting grounds (except in the prairies) usually
consisted of the watershed of the streams of valleys well-enclosed by hills or high mountains. The
Indians knew that nobody owned the land, but it was their property in the sense that they had knowledge
about it.
Hazel Bright [1969] The last Quileute monolingual speaker, Hazel spoke very little English. She was in
her 90s in 1969. Speaking of when she was a small girl through her daughter, who interpreted.
When I was a girl (1870s & ‘80s), we used to spend a lot of time in the prairies. Then, it stopped all of a
sudden.
William (Big Bill) Penn [1971] Big Bill Penn was born in 1888. He was called “Big Bill” to distinguish him
from his bother, William E. Penn, Little Bill. He was for many years the last member of the Sibaxwolayo,
Quileute whalers’ secret society called the “oily voiced song”; and claimed to be the last person alive that
had been part of a successful traditional whaling crew.
(Description paraphrased from oral description by Penn, p.519, J. Powell Quileute Notebook #4, 1970;
taken down as part of the discussion of Quileute placenames that served as the basis for Placenames of
the Quileute Indians by J.V. Powell, William Penn and others, Pacific Northwest Quarterly, Vol. 63:3, pp.
105-112.)
When Bill was young (c1895?), he remembers his family spent time during the summer (hot berry time,
August?) camped up on Forks Prairie, qit’layaqwoqw. There were whiteman houses up in the prairie already
and a number of Quileute families lived up there in old t’icik’als (smokehouses) along the Qalo’wa
and Boq’wac’hi’l Rivers. They camped, fixed up a bark hut shelter that they had used before (Loq’wati).
They lived off the land: elk, deer, buried bread (a ground bracken root paste loaf wrapped in skunk cabbage
leavs put in the ashes under live coals), berries. There was a drying rack for meat, big one. (Bill)
Thought they were going to burn the prairie because his father talked about it a lot and he was excited
and a little scared about a big fire, but there was no fire. They didn’t burn it that year. The whitemen
didn’t like them setting fires in the prairies. Later he saw them burning part of Sat’ayaqw (Quileute Prairie),
but they only burned a small area, burned when the grass was damp and it didn’t make a big fire.
151