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

a significant part of the Makah’s material culture and food supply, as will be detailed below. In fact, the
Makah would have found it difficult to carry on their ocean-based economy without plant products, since
fish nets, fishing lines, fish weirs, baskets for the gathering of marine invertebrates, storage containers for
dried salmon, fish drying racks, harpoon lines, harpoon shafts, canoe sails, and canoes were all constructed
from materials derived from plants.
Relative to animals (both marine and terrestrial), plants are not well represented in the archaeo-
logical record. Whereas the bones, shells, and calcified exoskeletons of animals resist decay and remain
in the soil for archaeologists to analyze, most plant tissue is highly perishable, especially in the moist
environment of the Olympic Peninsula. With few exceptions, the remains of plants utilized by the Makah
and other tribes of the Olympic Peninsula have not survived. In Pacific Northwest archaeology in general,
this has resulted in a systematic bias toward groups’ animal-based material culture and toward the roles
of men, who did most of the hunting and fishing.
Nevertheless, we know from the several other types of evidence that plants were as impor-
tant overall to the Makah as animals. Plants provided fuel for heat and cooking, building materials for
structures, pliable leaves, stems, and roots for basketry, medicines, and fiber- and vitamin-rich foods for
balancing a diet high in meat. After interviewing some Makah elders in the 1980s, Steven Gill (2005) concluded
that plant foods may have made up almost 50 percent of the diet.
One reflection of the dual importance of land and sea to the Makah is their calendar (see Table
2). In keeping with the view that time is circular rather than linear in nature, the Makah call the year ts e
qwa q Etc, which means “once around,” and they name each lunar month for a significant feature of that
time of the year. For most of the months, this feature is the appearance of or harvest time for a particular
plant or animal (Waterman 1920:45 vol. I). Months named after plants (five) outnumber those named for
animals (four). The natural cycles of renewal underlying this conception of the year were the heartbeat of
Makah life, and these cycles in turn determined the portion of the varied natural world toward which the
Makah turned their attention at any particular season. From their calendar, we can infer that the Makah
were tied to terrestrial landscapes, and in seeking a certain kind of berry or other plant, they would return
year after year to the particular places where that plant could be found. The fact that the month of September
is connected with “the season for cranberries” underscores the importance of bogs as a habitat
type to the Makah food economy. According to George B. Rigg (1925) who authored a number of articles
on sphagnum bogs of the Pacific coast (1940; 1958), listed the bog cranberry as a characteristic bog plant
and noted that it had “been found outside of bogs in very rare instances only.”
The Ozette people ranged widely over their territory to hunt and gather the land’s resources.
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