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

The Makah are in favor of the reintroduction of burning to the Ozette Prairies. Ben Johnson, Jr.
(2006), former Chairman of the Makah Tribal Council, addressed this action in his comments on the Draft
General Management Plan/Environmental Impact Statement for Olympic National Park:
Cultural landscape definitions seem to exclude prehistoric landscape features.
Prehistoric features such as the Ozette prairies are being lost due to the conflict with
wilderness designation and management. These prairies are important cultural
resources as they provide a source of medicinal plants. Limitations on fire use prevent
the long-term maintenance of these cultural landscapes.
The restoration of coastal wetlands in other regions has met with some success. New Lake Fen
in coastal Oregon has been burned and the shore pines girdled with encouraging initial results (Christy
2005:16). Richard Hebda (pers. comm. 2009) says: “Our work at Burns Bog is all about doing in the trees.
We are raising the water table and increasing the hydroperiod by damming peripheral and internal
drainage ditches in order to kill or reduce the growth of pine and encourage growth of Sphagnum. We are
still trying to understand the basic processes” (see Howie et al. 2009).
The story of the Ozette Prairies and their former indigenous use and management is an important
story to be told to park visitors. Conservation biology textbooks that highlight indigenous conservation
strategies, for the most part, only use examples from locations other than the United States (Groom et
al. 2006). Ecology textbooks that discuss cooperative relationships in nature between humans and plants
and/or other animals such as mutualism, feature domestication as the main embodiment of that interaction
(Townsend et al. 2008). The Ozette Prairies are an example of places where rich biodiversity, beauty,
and human use all co-existed for centuries or millennia. The Ozette people belonged to the Ozette Prairies,
and so even now, more than 100 years after the establishment of the Ozette and Makah Reservations,
the wetlands can help us understand how it is possible for humans to fit within nature.
63