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

work picking them. I pick for one-half day and get tired. They are right on the moss.
I kneel, sit, and lay down. I gather the berries at the end of September to November.
Bears eat cranberries and maybe coyotes (Pat Boachup, Makah, pers. comm. 2002).
Ethnobotanist Steve Gill has established that both salal berries (2005:407) and bog blueberries
(2005:411) were gathered on the Ozette Prairies; and Gary Ray (Makah, pers. comm. 2007) corroborates
this fact for salal berries: “All of the Allabush [Makah] sisters—Isabel Ides, Ruth Claplanhoo, Lena Mc-
Gee, and Margaret Irving gathered them [salal] at the Ozette Prairies.”
Indian tea (Ledum
groenlandicum; also known as
wild, Hudson Bay, swamp,
Labrador, or cranberry tea)
was gathered on the Ozette
Prairies, where it grows in
association with cranberries.
A number of elders reported
the former practice of gathering
this plant on the wetlands.
Yvonne Wilke (pers.
comm. 2002), with agreement
from her mother, Sadie Johnson,
noted that “there is a
Figure 25. Indian tea (Ledum groenlandicum), also known as Labrador tea, was (and continues
to be) an important medicinal plant of the wetlands. Ahlstrom’s Prairie. Photograph by Kat
prairie too where they could get Anderson, 2007
tea at Ozette. They would gather
in September.” Leah Parker (pers. comm. 2002) said, “I imagine my mother picked the tea leaves because
she used to go and pick cranberries [there on the Ozette Prairies].” According to Kate McCarty (pers.
comm. 2007), “My mother-in-law said that there’s some Indian tea on the prairies. She meant Ozette
Prairies. When Spencer [her Makah husband] was alive, we went down to Ozette and he’d pick the tea. It
was sometime between 1960 and 1969.” Gary Ray (pers. comm. 2006) reported that “Isabel Ides [Makah]
gathered it there” and he says that the Indian tea plant is called “Ozette tea”—an allusion to both its use
by the Ozette people and its harvest on the Ozette Prairies.
Continuing an ancient custom, the Makah still gather the leaves from the reservation, steep
them and drink the resulting tea as a refreshing beverage (Anderson 2002-2007; Gill 1984). Pat Boachup
(Makah, pers. comm. 2002) describes the gathering and use of this plant:
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