CONCLUSION: “EVENTS HAPPEN WHEN YOU GET A WHALE”

After having lain still in bed since before dawn on May 17, 1999, Polly McCarty received the news that the whale her partner Theron Parker had harpooned was finally dead. Great-granddaughter of the famed Makah whaler Hiškwi (“hish-kwee”), McCarty observed customary rituals that kept her silent and motionless in bed while Parker whaled. Having learned that the whaling crew was on their way home, she and two other women with partners aboard the Hummingbird made their way to the Neah Bay waterfront but saw that the massive crowd of people would prevent them from reaching the beach in order to greet the canoe and the whale ashore. As McCarty recalled, family members “gathered around us, one on each side, and they sang the prayer songs with the rattling…. It was like parting the Red Sea, everybody moving aside, and we got to go right in the front.”1 Their long day continued as the People of the Cape welcomed ashore the first whale in the past seventy-one years.

Reviving an active whaling practice had benefited the community in many ways. As tribal elder Dale Johnson stated, “Events happen when you get a whale.” Families performed songs and dances, and the tribal nation hosted a grand potlatch for guests from across the region and beyond. The 1999 hunt generated interest in other customary marine practices, revitalized Makah culture, and reconnected elders and youth by providing a desire to pass down—and to receive—teachings and tribal histories. It demonstrated the continued cultural importance of tribally specific hunting practices and helped move Makah culture from the museum back onto the water. Dan Greene, a Makah fisher with a whaling lineage, noted that the hunt illustrated that “[whaling] wasn’t lost to us.”² Even the racist backlash against Makah whaling had positive consequences because it brought the community together and encouraged some to take more notice of their heritage, something they had ignored before. Most important, Makahs recognize that the revival of whaling expressed both tribal sovereignty and their identity as the People of the Cape. From the perspective that the sea is their country, the 1999 hunt was part of the tribal nation’s continuing efforts to reclaim customary marine space.3

On that May morning at the close of the twentieth century, Makah whalers did more than harpoon a whale—they dramatically anchored their nation’s identity to the sea, just as generations of ancestors had done. Through spiritual beliefs and customary practices such as whaling, sealing, and fishing, historic Makahs transformed the sea into their sovereign space. They guarded this space from others, reinforcing the understanding that local waters belonged to the People of the Cape. For thousands of years, strategic exploitation of this marine borderland made Makahs a powerful, influential people. During the century after the arrival of non-Natives in this corner of the Pacific Ocean, the Makah relationship with the ocean and their customary marine resources enabled them to participate in global networks of exchange, to resist US assimilation efforts, and to retain greater autonomy than many other land-based reservation communities.

However, from the late nineteenth through early twentieth centuries, over-exploitation of marine resources undercut Makah success and power. Efficient Native hunters—Makahs included—nearly exterminated sea otters in local waters by the early nineteenth century, pushing non-Native traders to ply northern regions along the Northwest Coast when seeking valuable “soft gold.” By the mid- to late nineteenth century, European, Japanese, and Euro-American hunters exacted a lethal toll on the Pacific’s sea mammal species. Hunting any cetacean that provided oil, baleen, and other commodities, whalers brought one species after another to the brink of extinction. Wasteful non-Native over-hunting of fur seals triggered national and international conservation efforts. Backed by the London fur industry, influential Euro-Americans harnessed the power of the state to cut out small-scale pelagic sealing operations, such as Makah hunters and schooner owners, while protecting profits earned by large corporations. In the early twentieth century, similar dynamics of overfishing and conservation efforts worked in concert with non-Native fishers with better access to capital to diminish Makah access to tribal marine space and the resources that provided both a livelihood and food for the table. The loss of these customary practices undercut the economic base and autonomy of the People of the Cape at the time that government officials sought to exert more control over Natives. Concern over the dearth of whales off Cape Flattery in the early twentieth century even prompted Makahs to suspend the active practice of whaling—an activity at the heart of their cultural identity—until whale populations rebounded. Yet Makahs fought back with various legal and political strategies to reclaim key aspects of the sea and access to marine resources during the second half of the twentieth century. The 1999 whale hunt was a continuation of these efforts.

Welcoming the whale home, 1999. Harpooner Theron Parker conducts the i·qa· (“tsee-kah”) ceremony to honor the whale. Photograph by Theresa Parker, courtesy the Makah Cultural and Research Center, Neah Bay, WA.

Focusing on marine rather than terrestrial spaces provides us with a clearer view into the murky waters of the past. First, it reveals that Makah marine space was part of an indigenous borderlands composed of specific networks and socio-political dynamics. Diplomacy, trade, kinship, and violence intertwined the lives of the distinct peoples of the ča·di· borderland. Native borderlands networks were in place long before the arrival of non-Natives to the Northwest Coast, and indigenous power and dynamics shaped the initial phase of cross-cultural interactions. When imperial actors entered the borderlands in the late eighteenth century, they provided new opportunities for conflict within the context of existing tensions among powerful Native chiefs, such as Maquinna (Mowachaht), Wickaninnish (Clayoquot), and Tatoosh (Makah). As the imperial rivalry between the United States and United Kingdom transformed this region into the transnational space known as the Oregon Country during the first half of the nineteenth century, indigenous borderlands dynamics persisted. Powerful Makah chiefs, such as isi·t (“klih-seet”) and Yelaub (“yeh-luh-koob”), traded whale oil and furs and exploited both indigenous and colonial borderlands networks to maintain the influence of the People of the Cape. Their actions shaped non-Native perceptions of the Makah as a powerful and influential people to respect and even fear. In the later nineteenth century, Makahs such as the Claplanhoo family leveraged existing indigenous borderlands networks to raise the necessary capital and labor to succeed in both the Native and settler-colonial world of the Pacific Northwest through fur sealing. This focus on the regional indigenous borderlands demonstrates that these networks persisted long after the United States and United Kingdom (later Canada) imposed a borderline in 1846.

Borderlands strategists such as Tatoosh, isi·t, Yelaub, and the Claplanhoos exploited marine products and social networks to frustrate imperial processes. Tatoosh prevented the British trader John Meares from exploring the Strait of Juan de Fuca and sailing into Puget Sound. By monopolizing much of the maritime fur trade within the strait, the powerful Makah chief expanded his influence in the region and made the People of the Cape a force maritime fur traders respected and feared at times. Although Chiefs isi·t and Yelaub embraced divergent strategies for dealing with expanding settler-colonial power, their attitudes of accommodation and intimidation extended Tatoosh’s legacy—Makahs were a powerful people colonial authorities needed to appease. Therefore, when US representatives came to Neah Bay in 1855 to impose a treaty on the tribal nation, Governor Stevens acceded to Makah demands that protected not just tribal lands but also tribal waters and their access to marine resources that had made them an influential people for generations. By whaling, sealing, and fishing—customary practices protected by the Treaty of Neah Bay—Makahs maintained their wealth and influence within both the ča·di· borderland and the settler-colonial world. Makah success allowed them to blunt the worst effects of US assimilation until the end of the nineteenth century.

A focus on marine space reveals a more complete understanding of the ways that indigenous peoples such as Makahs engaged settler-colonialism. During the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, efficient Native hunters and chiefs exploited marine resources and indigenous borderlands trade networks to fill the cargo holds of maritime fur trading vessels and provision crews. The first extractive industry on the Northwest Coast, the maritime fur trade began a process that brought non-Native empires to the region. When the commercial focus shifted to the land-based fur trade, Native peoples and networks remained central to the success of companies, such as the Hudson’s Bay Company. The People of the Cape were a key component—perhaps the key component—in these early industries. When US and British settlers came to the region, indigenous commodities harvested from the ocean and land provided desperately needed food for the newcomers and made survival possible for underprepared settlers. Native labor and goods also established the foundation for such commercial ventures as logging, whaling, and provisioning. Ironically, Anglos often take pride in these entrepreneurial activities and credit them for taming the wilderness and making this region into the US and Canadian Wests. Yet none of this could have happened without the involvement and support of the indigenous peoples of the Northwest Coast. By the 1880s, Natives like the Makahs did not just work as laborers or hunters for non-Natives in the settler-colonial economy; important financial actors, Makahs invested in the extractive industries of the North Pacific, which contributed to national development. When possible, these investments continued into the twentieth century.

Last, an examination of the relationship of Makahs to marine space and the resources within it demonstrates that the People of the Cape combined customary practices with new opportunities and technologies to succeed on their own terms in the settler-colonial world. By hunting sea otters and trading the pelts and various indigenous commodities, Makahs and other Native peoples of the ča·di· borderland engaged new markets of exchange and brought a bevy of non-Native goods into their communities. These cross-cultural exchanges did not result independency, as some scholars conclude. Rather, chiefs funneled the goods and cash into sociocultural networks and employed them to maintain and expand their influence over weaker rivals in the borderlands. By the mid-nineteenth century, Makahs looked to new technologies to expand the range of customary marine practices and participate more closely in the market economy. Makah sealers and fishers in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries exploited the fur seal, salmon, and halibut fisheries in a commercial capacity, earning cash instead of exchanging goods for their catches. With this money, they bought modern vessels, houses, automobiles, food, and clothing, while still spending large amounts of money on cultural priorities such as potlatches. By adapting non-Native technologies and markets of exchange to fit their specific cultural needs, the People of the Cape maintained their autonomy and controlled tribal spaces—both marine and terrestrial—until the end of the nineteenth century. Although economic and political factors substantially limited Makah marine space and access to ocean resources during the early twentieth century, Makah leaders in the second half of the century fought back in the courts—yet another new avenue for action—to regain some of what they had lost.

A TRADITIONAL FUTURE

The story of Makahs and their relationship to customary marine space seems like a narrative of decline. Basically, Makahs had a good life until Euro-Americans ruined everything. Similar to other American Indian histories, though, the specific contours of this story are particular to the Makah experience. Non-Native diseases decimated but did not destroy the People of the Cape, leaving them susceptible to the nefarious agents of empire. Granted, many Makahs died from disease, including key chiefs in the mid-nineteenth century; however, new leaders emerged to confront the US treaty negotiators who purposefully came hot on the heels of the demographic catastrophe. Still reeling from the deaths of close family members, Makah negotiators protected what was most important to them and their people—the sea. Settler-colonial intrusions also did not automatically ruin Makahs’ good lives. Rather, for most of the nineteenth century, the People of the Cape succeeded because they engaged the settler-colonial world, but on their own terms and for their own reasons. This allowed them to maintain enough power to complicate imperial processes such as trade, settlement, treaties, and assimilation, activities that took away the cultures, powers, lands, and resources of so many indigenous peoples elsewhere. Makahs did not experience real trouble until non-Native forces wiped out the resource foundation for Northwest Coast societies and employed the regulatory power of the state to shut out indigenous peoples from customary practices and spaces that had once made them wealthy and powerful. In their newly impoverished condition, the People of the Cape became more susceptible to increased assimilation pressure exerted by dictatorial Indian superintendents.

Older, traditional approaches to American Indian history characterize indigenous peoples as one-dimensional victims. Scholars who assume this perspective shackle indigenous peoples to a static and nostalgic past while giving non-Natives too much power to shape outcomes. This approach ignores the contingent nature of settler-colonial expansion and overlooks how resilient American Indian individuals, communities, and nations adapted and responded to colonialism and its lethal results. The story of the Makah represents an “inclusive and empowering, rather than imperialistic and dominating” history, rebutting simpler stories that we often tell about the indigenous past.4 Makahs frustrated and engaged settler-colonial processes for their own purposes, and they and other indigenous peoples on both sides of the border proved central to the making of the US and Canadian Wests.

Within the context of indigenous history, narratives of decline continue to problematically frame debates over American Indian identity, sovereignty, and treaty rights in nations today. The controversy over the 1999 whale hunt illustrated this. Critics failed to understand why Makahs continue to value whaling, openly wondering why the tribal nation cannot “get with the twentieth century.” As one opponent stated, “With their supermarkets and cars, [Makahs] no longer need to kill a being as sentient as our mammoth whales.” Even non-Native supporters of the Makah right to hunt see this as a tribal effort to “return to [a] whaling past.”⁵ Critics and some supporters alike believe that the Makah nation is trying to turn back the clock, to live in the past, by reviving whaling.

A better understanding of Makah history reveals that we should see the tribal nation’s revival of whaling from a different perspective. By pursuing iapuk (“chih-tuh-pook,” whales) off Cape Flattery, today’s Makahs are articulating a traditional future instead of grasping at a long-lost, static past.⁶ Makah-language teacher Crystal Thompson explains that whaling remains important for the future of her people because of the way it restores customary indigenous foodways, encouraging her community to eat “the things we were meant to eat instead of what people brought here for us.” Janine Ledford, director of the tribal nation’s museum and cultural center, places this within the larger framework of building a “healthy population” for the future, explaining that the preparations young men made to whale, along with the support from their families, strengthened the community.⁷ In addition to other marine initiatives pursued by the tribal nation, whaling illustrates that this American Indian nation lives in the present and looks toward the future while retaining what is best about its traditions.8 This marine practice defines the Makahs as a people distinct from mainstream society.

The 1999 whale hunt and continued whaling efforts are part of a longer Makah strategy to craft a traditional future. During the maritime fur trade, Chief Tatoosh exploited a customary resource—sea otters—and borderlands networks to extend his authority over neighboring peoples. His successors, such as Chiefs isi·t and Yelaub, pursued a similar strategy by trading furs, whale oil, and fish with Hudson’s Bay Company traders at nearby forts and passing US traders. Even when the chiefs confronted the expanding settler-colonial world in more aggressive ways, they looked toward the future instead of the past. They knew that in order for the People of the Cape to maintain their influence in the nineteenth century, the newcomers would need to respect Makah power on indigenous terms. During the treaty negotiations of 1855, Chief aqa·wi (“tsuh-kah-wihtl”) and the other Makah leaders pushed for treaty provisions that protected the tribal nation’s rights to customary marine practices and spaces because of their concern over the future. Chief alču·t (“kuhl-choot”) argued that if his people could not take whales, seals, and fish as they had always done, he feared they “would become poor.”⁹ Today’s Makahs note that their ancestors thought of the tribal nation’s future welfare when securing whaling, sealing, and fishing rights in the Treaty of Neah Bay. When reflecting back on the treaty his ancestors’ negotiated, elder Ed Claplanhoo notes that Makah leaders understood that “the land was valuable, but it wasn’t as valuable as the water. It wasn’t as valuable as the ocean, which had all of the things that we needed to live on.”¹⁰

Makah pelagic sealing during the late nineteenth century exemplified both the benefits and challenges of striving for a traditional future. Combining a customary practice (hunting seals) with modern opportunities and technologies (global markets and schooners) allowed the People of the Cape to expand their marine space into the Bering Sea and accumulate substantial wealth. This, in turn, strengthened their ability to resist assimilation and shape a Makah future that remained distinct to their identity. Yet conservation concerns over the Pribilof fur seal herd resulted in national legislation and international conventions that cut out Makah sealers and other small operators; a similar set of factors worked against Makah fishers a generation later. These conservation efforts codified the stereotype of the Native hunter or fisher who could engage in these customary practices only with premodern equipment and for subsistence purposes. This assumption locked indigenous peoples and their customs in the past and denied them a place in the modern world, extending nineteenth-century racist attitudes into the twentieth century and today.

Current Makah efforts at reviving the active practice of whaling demonstrate the tribal nation’s perseverance at articulating a traditional future and the challenges of doing so. During the decades when they were not whaling, the People of the Cape maintained the tradition by including whaling implements in important social events and by performing songs and dances connected to the practice. They clandestinely continued harvesting whale oil, blubber, and meat from drift whales that washed ashore. Because harvesting whale products—even from carcasses that had washed ashore—was illegal, the federal government guarded, buried, and dynamited beached whales to prevent “scavenging” during the 1980s and 1990s. Those living outside the reservation did not see Makah efforts at maintaining the whaling tradition, which caused non-Natives to believe that the community had abandoned the tradition and left it in the past. Critics therefore mistakenly assumed that Makahs were grasping at a nostalgic past when they expressed the intent to revive whaling.11

Makahs prepare to embark on the 2005 Tribal Canoe Journeys to the Lower Elwha. The People of the Cape have been active participants in Tribal Canoe Journeys for many years. Photograph by Owen Luck. Image supplied courtesy of the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University.

Ahousahts approach Neah Bay during the 2010 Tribal Canoe Journeys. That year the People of the Cape hosted the intertribal event, drawing people together from across the a·di· borderland. Photograph by Owen Luck. Image supplied courtesy of the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University.

During the second half of the twentieth century, momentum built for a return to whaling. From the late 1960s until the early 1980s, the archaeological findings at Ozette, a Makah village just south of Cape Flattery, “sparked a cultural renaissance” in the community.12 Several hundred years ago, before the arrival of non-Natives to this region, a massive mudslide entombed part of Ozette village, one of the principal sea mammal hunting sites along the Northwest Coast. Most of the forty thousand artifacts and extensive faunal remains dug out of the mud demonstrated to Western academics what Makahs already knew: they have always been a people of the sea. Eighty-eight percent of the weight of faunal remains came from harvested whales and demonstrated that Makahs hunted sea mammals for both subsistence and commercial purposes.¹³ The archaeological work at Ozette uncovered the centrality of whaling to Makah cultural, subsistence, and commercial activities. George Bowechop, one of the executive directors of the Makah Whaling Commission, points out that the Ozette dig “validated the teachings of our elders to the younger people, at saying that we were whalers.”14 This strengthened the community’s ties to its whaling tradition.

Soon after the findings at Ozette, the People of the Cape considered exercising their whaling rights once again. After the federal government removed gray whales from the list of endangered species in 1994, the Makah Tribal Council secured government support to petition the International Whaling Commission for a whaling quota. In 1997, the commission granted the Makah nation a quota of five whales annually, and a year later, the tribal council formed its own whaling commission to oversee the hunt. Responding to animal rights activists concerned that the “traditional” method of hunting was cruel, the tribal whaling commission contracted with a University of Maryland veterinarian to adapt a large-caliber rifle to kill a harpooned whale more humanely and safely. After thousands of hours of physical and ritual preparation, Makah whalers—with key support from their families and community—harpooned and landed their first whale in seventy-one years.¹⁵

By placing the 1999 whale hunt within the larger context of a Makah narrative that focuses on their connection to marine space, we can see that the People of the Cape have a history of combining customary practices with modern opportunities and technologies. By deciding what constitutes “traditional culture” and how they will practice it, Makahs are exercising self-determination and expressing their identity in today’s world.¹⁶ In addition to a revival of canoe culture and participation in the annual Tribal Canoe Journeys, this is just part of a larger strategy of ways that they are reclaiming the sea. Or as Paul Parker, a Makah whaling commissioner, argues, today’s whaling efforts are “protecting our identity and protecting what belongs to us … as far as culture and our land go.”¹⁷ Makahs continue to confront the ongoing effects of colonialism, representing themselves as a modern indigenous community amid national and international pressures. Indigenous traditions and customary practices are not static cultural components frozen in time. They change over time. For Makahs, these changes exemplify “the resilient, adaptive capacity of Indian groups to respond to colonialism in challenging and often deadly circumstances.”¹⁸ The People of the Cape are demonstrating that they live in the present and are moving into the future while retaining what they believe is best about their traditions. Or, as one Makah phrased it: “We are whalers. We don’t want a Wonder Bread culture.”¹⁹