Makah Tribe Plans to Reclaim Ancient Whaling Tradition

The Makah reservation is just 120 miles from Seattle as the crow flies, but this community at the northwesternmost point of the Lower 48 states is a world away in space and time.

The trip takes at least four hours by car--more if ferry lines are long for the Puget Sound crossing. The last 50 miles from bustling Port Angeles look like a straight shot on the map, but the road takes tortuous twists and turns along the rocky coast of the Strait of Juan de Fuca.

The town is strung along the beach, its meandering streets bracketed by a Coast Guard station to the east and Cape Flattery to the west. Across the strait, blue in the distance, is Canada’s Vancouver Island.

When nine members of the tribe’s whaling crew paddle out in their 32-foot hand-hewn cedar canoe and lean left around the cape, the world of sea and stone that welcomes them is the world as it has always been--as it was 1,000 years ago, when Europe was floundering through the Middle Ages, and 2,000 years ago, when Christianity was born.

For millenniums, the Makah have gleaned a life from the Pacific and this forested coast--harvesting berries, roots, deer and elk from the land, and from the sea, shellfish, salmon, halibut, seal and whale.

Until this century, whaling set the Makah apart from most American tribes in the region and helped define them as a fierce, even dangerous, people.

It stopped in the 1920s, when the great spring and fall migrations of gray whale dwindled away. A population of more than 30,000 animals had been reduced to dangerous lows--about 4,000--by 19th century demands for whale oil used in lamps.

Makah whalers gave up the pursuit when the often fruitless hunts began taking them farther from shore to “where the green water turned blue,” says Darrell Markishtum, at 35 the oldest paddler on the tribe’s novice crew. The youngest are 18.

In 1994, when the gray whale was removed from the endangered species list, the Makah moved to resume the tradition. This fall, sometime after Oct. 1, they hope to take at least one whale as the animals migrate south from the Aleutian chain to warmer southern waters. The whales usually begin their long journey south from Alaska in early October.

But if the land and the water seem unchanged, the political world is not.

The great mammals once slaughtered wholesale in their nursery lagoons in Mexico’s Sea of Cortez now are revered by much of the world, and the Makahs’ plans are vehemently opposed by whale-watchers and animal-rights groups who challenged the hunt in court and hope to obstruct it on site.

The would-be whalers are undaunted in their quest to provide food for their economically struggling community of about 2,000 people. The jobless rate here is about 55% as the tribe copes with faltering fishing runs and a changing timber industry.

“They’ve forgotten how men survive,” said Markishtum of the opposition. “They’ve forgotten the basics of life.”

Whaling looms large in Makah culture. Images of the animals--up to 50 feet long and weighing as much as 40 tons--are scattered throughout the town, ornamenting the high school and the backdrop used for traditional dances.

An archeological dig at the old Makah village of Ozette, about 15 miles down the coast, turned up artifacts dating back two millenniums that suggest whaling--for grays and humpback whales--was “pretty constant all those 2,000 years,” said University of Puget Sound anthropologist-archeologist David Huelsbeck.

Markishtum, who works in tribal fisheries and is learning the near-forgotten Makah language, offers a family story of a whaling ancestor whose foot became tangled in the harpoon rope. When a whale was harpooned, he was yanked overboard and dragged down and away.

Remarkably, the man recovered from his long submersion in the icy Pacific to tell of a vision of “seven daylights,” Markishtum relates in a voice hushed with wonder.

Much of the talk here “about reclaiming cultural values and so forth can sound like it might be just rhetoric, but it isn’t,” Huelsbeck says. “The people in the community feel very strongly about it.”

Last winter, members of the whaling crew attended a gathering of North Pacific whaling captains at Barrow, Alaska. They made friends with Alaska Eskimo whalers and saw visiting captains from the Russian Far East.

“So strong,” Makah whaler and carver Micah McCarty said as he recalled a barrel-chested Russian whaler whose silent message of power and fortitude transcended the language barrier.

The 1855 Treaty of Neah Bay, under which the Makah ceded most of their lands on the Olympic Peninsula, contains a unique provision granting the tribe the right to hunt whale.

For decades, the Makah survived without whaling. The whales were nearly gone and the remote tribe had other concerns, its culture under siege by U.S. officials who forbade use of the language by tribal youngsters in school and told them that their culture was evil.

These days, the Makah are rediscovering that culture and trying to recover their language and spiritual roots. They struggle for purification and try to resist assimilation into what McCarty calls the “Wonder-bread culture” of mainstream America.

It’s complicated work, living in two worlds. Markishtum is one of several veterans on the whaling crew from this community, whose warriors have served U.S. forces in every conflict of this century and--so far--always come home.

Most who leave--to serve, to work, to study--do come back in the end to this faraway patch of paradise overlooking the Pacific and the strait.

“Neah Bay is home and has been home since time began, for thousands of years,” Huelsbeck said. “There’s a connection there that those of us whose parents or grandparents were immigrants don’t have.”

And now that the gray-whale population is back to healthy numbers, the Makah are preparing to return to whaling.

The International Whaling Commission last year approved a U.S.-Russian request for a five-year take of 120 whales by the Chukchi natives of the Russian Far East and the Makah, who were allotted a maximum of five whales a year through 2002.

The Makah crew has been practicing paddling all summer, and those hoping to throw the harpoon have been practicing with that as well. The plan is to strike the whale from the canoe with a harpoon, followed immediately by a shot from a .50-caliber rifle--a move intended to ensure as humane a kill as possible.

The Makah concede that only one whale hunt is likely this fall, and they may not take a whale on their first try. But they will try, and they will head out again next spring, when the northbound migration passes the tribe’s ancestral place.

In the last 30 years, virtually all commercial whaling has stopped under IWC rules. This year, about 1,300 whales will be killed--1,100 of them by Norway and Japan, where whale meat is considered a delicacy, and the rest by aboriginal people in Alaska, Canada, the Caribbean, Greenland, Russia--and, possibly, the Pacific Northwest.