Guy Capoeman (b. 1969) is a canoe carver and President of the Quinault Tribe. In this June 2025 interview with HistoryLink's Elisa Law, Capoeman discusses the interconnected relationship between the Quinault people and their ancestral lands. He shares how traditional knowledge passed down through generations - including identifying plants for food and medicine and understanding animal behavior for hunting - guides their use of natural resources. Capoeman recounts the process of carving an ocean canoe, reviving elements of long-dormant ocean culture, and the various types of wood used to do so. He highlights how the Quinault worldview, which emphasizes communal land use, conflicts with the disruptive impact of the 1887 Dawes Act. The interview concludes with Capoeman's vision for the future and the tribe's ongoing efforts to reacquire ancestral lands to manage sustainably for the benefit of generations to come. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
"It's All Connected"
Guy Capoeman: Living here on the Quinault, you're exposed to the natural elements. I think at the age of like 5, 6, or so, I recall going out into the forest as a part of our cultural arts program and learning what the different plants were from sprouts to salmonberry, ḳ̓wəllɑ sprouts jɑɑns, blackberries Wɑs, camas bulbs. You know, those sorts of foods that have been used by our ancestors since we've been in this place since the beginning of time. And then the cedar bark - how important that is to our people and what our old people use that bark for, and how we've used it and kept its use in this day. And that went on all through my life from that early age.
Then at a certain point in my life around the age of 10 or so, I was exposed to how to utilize a firearm for hunting purposes. And then you go deeper in the forest - instead of just the salmonberry, blackberry area, where the elk live - and you experience how the animals utilize the forest at certain times of the year for either calving purposes or winter nourishment of certain plants and foods. So, you learn where to hunt at certain times of the year in the forest, you know. It's all connected.
What happens when a place is logged, you know, that herd of elk will move and they become acclimated to our use of the forest. And maybe not so much in how I would like, for the benefit of the herds, right? Because then they're exposed to roads and they're exposed to a lot of road hunting. So, we have to adjust our management to protect that herd at that time of year. So, all those pieces are tied to the management of the forest. We know through years and years of management that what we do to the forest affects those animals and affects us in our subsistence.
Carving the May-ee Part One: Carving with Crab Apple, Alder, and Redcedar
GC: I came home after my four-year degree and an elder came to me and he said, "Hey, we want you to carve an ocean canoe." And I thought, "Oh, an ocean canoe, aren't those big?" And he said, "Yeah, they're humongous. They go out in the ocean." I thought, "Yeah, okay."
My family has always been known as canoe carvers. From race canoes, river canoes, you know, so on and so forth. I got whalers in my ancestry that owned those and would go out in treaty times. So, I was thinking that it was because of all of those things in that history.
So, I started researching because there hadn't been an ocean canoe here in, like, 100 years. I traveled around to different museums and places where there were Quinault canoes: ocean canoes, from sealing canoes, to the whaling canoes, or the travel canoes, the bigger ones.
I came back home and I got a chainsaw, axes, and Cooper's adze (the big adze with the lips on them) so you can cut cross-grain. We ended up getting a bunch of those and we roughed out the log. This old growth log or tree was nine feet tall at the butt and it was 40 feet long - just big. Probably one of the biggest trees I've seen. And our first task was to split that log.
So we had a guy climb up there, and we had a six-foot barred saw, and we ran that saw all the way down the length of it. We went out and we found the biggest crab apple. It's really hard wood, and we cut these chunks off of it. And we made these triangle-shaped wedges and we started hammering them in there. And then we got great big wedges, you know, like this wide and six feet long out of alder. And alder's pretty tough too. So, here's more timber. There's crab apple, there's alder, there's redcedar.
We started hammering those in there. And that thing just popped and the ground shook when the two pieces fell. Boom! So, we started to shape the canoe out of that.
The tree - I wasn't there when it was selected - but I know that old tree fallers and tribal members (elders) were there to choose which tree.
Choosing a Tree
GC: There's a site, Otook Creek. Otook Creek is where the carvers would go to drop the big cedars. There used to be old hulls that were there, and the carver must have passed away or something happened, and he wasn't able to finish. So, in our teaching, you just leave that. And it was all tossed over and brushed over when I was in my 20s, and I'm 55 now. So, you probably can't even recognize the hull. But you could see places where a tree had been adzed to remove a plank. You can see the fire burns, you know, the black, and you could barely make out an adze mark.
So yeah, there were places where people went to do certain things. And Otook Creek's probably 16 miles up the river. That wasn't too far from a water source, so you could slide it into the water and, you know, walk it down to the main stem and then use it. Dugouts are heavy, you know. Nowadays we get a log jack and pulleys on the truck to flip it over, but in them days it was all manpower and lever power.
Carving the May-ee Part Two: Awakening Ocean Culture
GC: We still had elders around at that time who carved river canoes and were familiar with the process of the ocean canoe. And we worked with a guy as well, Steve Brown, who's a known Pacific Northwest canoe carver. And he learned from old masters from up on the island, Neah Bay, Quileute, different other places. And the design of the West Coast canoe is the same there as it is here.
What I was told is that the first design of the ocean canoe came from one of the ancestors. He saw the thunderbird in the sky. And I don't know if this was a vision or a foresight or what, but he saw the thunderbird release his lightning fish that he whaled with. And the lightning fish went down into the water and it skimmed across the water. And it had the same profile as these canoes. And so that's where the first design came from.
We saw it as an awakening of ocean culture, which we knew would bring a lot of cultural elements back to life here. From paddle songs to paddle wood. The May-ee means "the beginning."
Carving the May-ee Part Three: Yew Wood for Paddles
GC: When you do a stroke of the paddle, the blade of your paddle actually bends. And as you're at the end of your stroke, the blade whips back. So, it helps you move the canoe. I mean, it's your muscle and your back and your crew and everything else. But the tools you use are designed in a certain way that maximize the effort.
The yew wood is another tree that's really hard to find because it takes so long for it to grow and get dense. You see a lot of saplings out there now if you go out to the cedar swamps and it'll take them a hundred years to get paddle size, right?
So, yew wood is something hard to come by here, and we put in place a policy. If you find a yew wood tree, don't just run it over with your logging equipment. Set it aside. And it has cultural purposes.
So that was a whole other lesson in how to make a proper paddle. You want to be able to hold your paddle from the end of the handle part, and you should be able to hold it level like this. And if it starts to fall, you have to take off more wood. It's too heavy. You ain't going to get very far if you got a real heavy paddle. So, paddle design and then the different other things in the canoe from the seats to the bailers. They were hand-carved bailers. We went all out on the first one.
"You Gotta Have the Best Wood"
GC: I've made 31 ocean canoes in my lifetime. It is just something that I fell in love with, something that I pursued. Because someone would say, "Well, what's your best canoe?" I'd say, "My next canoe is my best canoe." You know, because there was always something I could have shaped a little better, or put a little flare, or added more entry for speed, or narrow the stern for less drag. You know, there's always a tweak of some piece of it that you could change. And in order to do that, you gotta have the best wood.
And the hardest part as a canoe carver is finding the best trees out there nowadays, because a lot of the old growth has been cut. You know, with the exception of the park, with the exception of the tribal set asides that the tribe has set aside over the years for cultural purposes.
But with that being said, you can only get one per person. So, I haven't gotten mine yet. I've paid for mine to do these projects and you know, the last old growth log I got was 9,000 bucks and it came off of the lower reservation in one of the last stands of old growth on the lower res. Yeah, one of the last stands. And I asked myself, " Boy, what better use could we have of old growth?"
"You Walk the Same Forest"
GC: All of my older sons can carve a canoe, and you know, they learned from Dad. And how to use the grain. You know, what parts of the tree are for the bow and the stern and how to steam the canoe when it's done. Where to get that wood, where to get yew wood, where to get crab apple for the handles for your tools. You know, you can find some beside the road that's just small and has a lot of limbs. You have to go into the woods to find the good stuff, the thick pieces.
You know, they learned all those things and how they apply it in their life is up to them. But, like my dad always said, "Son, I'm teaching you how to fish not for you to make a living, but so that you'll know something about how your ancestors lived their life and you'll always have that information. You'll be able to share that with your kids."
You walk the same forest, you travel the same river, you hunt the same herds, you know. And you move about in the forest to where they are in the same pattern that my dad did, his dad did, you know, so on and so forth. It goes all the way back.
So I think about that when I'm out there and making your tools and doing certain things with certain wood. You know I could look at an older adze and say, "I know how they did that. I know why they picked the grain to be a certain way for this tool to work the way it does."
And to know those things and understand them is 90 percent of the battle. Being able to apply it is something you have to experience because somebody could tell you about it, but being able to put your hands on it and shape it and make it happen is something else.
Sourcing Wood from Home
GC: If I'm carving an ocean canoe or river canoe for a family here for ceremonial use - whether that be tribal journeys or to fish out of, or whatever - I would want the tree to be from here just because I believe that we have a connection with those resources since the beginning of time.
It goes back to our creation, you know. He made the first man and the first woman, set them down on the banks of the river here. And he asked them what they wanted to do. And they said, "We want to sustain ourselves with these fish, our relatives."
And the Maker taught them how to fish and all the things that they would need to fish, from the canoe to the fish trap to dip net to spears, all of those things. And then as he left, he told them, "Take care of these salmon and you take care of this land. You're always going to be here." So, you know, it all ties back to that time.
It's the worldview of the Quinault people. It's a little bit different than everybody else. You know, everybody has a worldview. Every race of man, you know? And what you do with that - your actions - are the most important thing. And the thing that got in the way for us is the federal policy. It kind of took us away from our worldview of the land and the forest. But I think we're getting back to it. I believe we've been for the last, I don't know, 30 years or so. How we see the forest, how we see the land, and what it impacts.
The Dawes Act on the Quinault Reservation
Guy Capoeman discusses the effects of the 1887 Dawes Act on the Quinault Reservation. The policy divided collectively held tribal lands into small individually owned allotments. The effects of this policy on the Quinault Reservation are also discussed in detail by Gary Morishima, Technical Advisor for Natural Resources for the Quinault Nation.
GC: The federal government has always been trying to take the Indian out of us, you know and get us to think like the mainstream American. And I believe their thought at that time was to get us to think in terms of land as an individual ownership, right? If I give you 80 acres of land, will you become a farmer and not a fisherman? And will you separate yourself from your community and live on your homestead and away from the rest of your family?
And the thing that makes the tribes so strong is our connectivity to each other. And you could say we're all related. We're all related in the sense of we all come from a common place and our ancestors came from that common place, all the way back in time immemorial. And that's our connection.
So I think that Dawes Act, the Allotment Act, nobody asked the tribe at that time, if we agree with that. It was just, "Boom, here we're handing out these 80-acre allotments to all fish-eating Indians."
So, folks all along the coast, Washington-wide, Oregon-wide, were all getting allotments here. Whether we agreed with it or not. And finally, the tribal council at the time said, "No, no, we want to screen everybody to see if they have any connections here first before you hand them an allotment."
They were having folks come forth that they didn't even know who were wanting an allotment here. Opportunists, you know, who were coming to sell their land to the timber companies, whether that's Rayonier, Weyerhaeuser, or any of the big timber companies that monopolized this reservation for their bank accounts.
So, to prevent that, you know, the tribal council at the time, 1900 to 1910, were starting to take an active role in who was getting an allotment here. But by that time, the damage was more or less already done, and 95 percent of the reservation was handed out as allotments.
I believe we're at 70 percent ownership now as the tribe. Big deal. Yeah. Yeah. But it took a while. In order to buy land, you have to have money and the resources. And so, the tribe over the years has been pursuing our economic health and finding resources to buy back land.
They gotta be willing to sell, but I'm going to tell you I own a share on an allotment with 300 and something other family members. So, the economic benefit of an allotment - I get a right-of-way check for nine bucks - there is no economic benefit. We're just landowners out here.
You know, I say that coming from a background where I believe that the whole reservation is for communal use. It isn't just mine or hers or his. It's for everybody to use and all our tribal members. The individualism of the Allotment Act [Dawes Act] is one of the efforts of the federal government to do tribes in. It didn't work here. Almost, but it didn't.
Buying Back the Forest
GC: As the chairman of the tribe, you know, the policy of the Nation is to try to buy back as much of the reservation as we can from willing sellers and from fee lands to trust lands to get back the [land]. The nation-ownership of the reservation has been a legacy project that's been left to us from former leaders. You have to continue to buy land, continue to buy land. So that's been a part of my march on council and as the chairman. You know, we have to buy fee land, put it into trust land in the Nation's name. And because ownership of the reservation is for management purposes. To manage the forest how we think it would benefit fish and other animals has always been our goal because all those things are connected to us.
We have to be able to do that, whether it be bigger buffer zones for fish, not logging certain prairie lands because it's a calving ground for elk, dismantling roads so that the hunters have to hop out of your truck and walk, it protects the elk. Ensuring that the areas are replanted right away to continue growth. I think those are all things that have been part of a policy of this Nation to keep the forest as healthy as we can.
I think there are certain parts of the forest that I don't want to log. I want to see units of Nation ownership put into carbon credit and just leave it there for 100 years. And imagine what that's going to produce in those areas. We haven't seen it because the whole reservation's been logged at one time or another. And in my lifetime, I've seen a regrowth, second-growth, a third-generation growth. And I've seen Old Grove stands and I've walked the one up on west boundary and it's like a cathedral there. You walk in there and there's these giant, giant cedar trees in there. You know, they're just amazing. They're beautiful. We have to conserve and buy back and manage as it benefits the Quinault Nation, and not my generation but the generations to come.
