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

Enhance productivity of above-ground food plants. Some Makah have distinct mem-
ories of Ts’oo-yuhs Prairie on the Makah reservation being burned specifically to enhance production of
both Indian tea and the many types of berries that grow there (see Appendix 5). According to Melissa
Peterson, Makah, “people who owned the marshes burned the marshes for the cranberry for the health
of the plant to increase yield and also to keep other invasive plants from taking over” (pers. comm. 2007).
Pat Boachup (Makah, pers. comm. 2002) agrees: “People burned in the cranberry marsh [Ts’oo-yuhs] to
promote a better crop of cranberries and Indian tea.”
50
Kate McCarty, a non-
Indian woman married for
many years to a Makah man,
further discusses the importance
of fire to the growth
and well-being of beverage
and food plants (see Figure
41):
There have
been a number
of people here
that talked
about burning
the Ts’oo-yuhs
Figure 41. Kate McCarty. Photograph by Kat Anderson, 2007.
Prairie at the
cranberry marsh
so that the trees
wouldn’t come—my father-in-law Jerry McCarty and Minerva Claplanhoo. The
Labrador tea can just keep growing and growing and growing until it gets real leggy.
And all that you have is just a few little leaves on top. But after it’s been burned then
it starts all over again. Its just like pinching flowers off of the chrysanthemum to make
them bush out. And the little cranberry plant—it seemed like when they would burn
them, they would just burn the top part of the sphagnum moss and not down where
the roots are. After a fire it seemed like there were more and then they would get less
and less (pers. comm. 2002).
Lloyd Colfax:
Greg Colfax, Makah, learned about burning of cranberry bogs in Ts’oo-yuhs Prairie from his dad
My dad mentioned that the [Ts’oo-yuhs] prairie was burned yearly or whenever it
was necessary. When the cranberry bogs would get so overgrown then the folks knew
that it was time to do it.... What I was told is that it just gets overgrown and you’ve
got few berries. And so you’ve got to burn it to burn down all the other kinds of
vegetation and plant life that chokes off the cranberries. Once you do that then they’ve
got room to do what they have to do. It [the fire] releases other kinds of fertilizers and