At the far north-western tip of the US, on Washington’s Olympic peninsula, forests and mountains give way to rocky headlands, beyond which stretches the Pacific Ocean. This beautiful landscape is the ancestral homeland of the Makah, a tribe who for thousands of years have fished and hunted whale and seal in the waters that today are sparkling in spring sunshine.
This is the culmination of a month-long road trip across the US, and it seems fitting to wind up with a visit to this nation’s native people. Our visit to the fishing village of Neah Bay is, however, about to teach us more about the complexity of modern America than we expected.
Rather than a totem-poled theme park of native culture, the Indian reservation looks like any other neighbourhood. Kids ride bikes and play on trampolines in front yards, dusty trucks tow boats along the oceanfront main strip, the elderly gather in the community centre. It’s hard to imagine that on May 17, 1999, this peaceful, ramshackle village was the subject of international focus. The Makah, who had ceased whaling in the 1920s due to declining gray whale stocks, controversially took to the seas once again for a singular hunt, exercising the restored rights of the unique Neah Bay treaty.
It was crazy for a couple of years,” says Kirk Wachendorf at the Makah Museum. “There were media and protesters everywhere. Some of them just wanted to see action, kind of like pouring gasoline on a fire. Now it’s gone the way I knew it would go – it made a lot of lawyers and judges happy.”
For Polly McCarty, former partner of the harpooneer, none of the emotion has faded.
Watching a grainy home video at her home, in front of walls papered with newspaper clippings, her recollections of that day are as vivid as ever.
It was a Whaler’s Moon when everything fell into place,” says McCarty, staring entranced at the screen. “The men from the whaling families had been training on the water for over a year, paddling 10-12 hours a day. My brother had been praying for 80 days straight. It was raining really hard that day but the beach was packed. There were even people in the water. It was just incredible.”
When the animal was finally dead, it was pulled ashore by five canoes and the meat and blubber divided up among the people of the community. Some of the whalers were given special names by other tribes out of deep respect and the celebratory dinner a week later brought tribal people from all over the world.
The reaction of the outside world was less favourable. Anti-whaling, animal rights and conservation groups roundly condemned the Makah’s decision, with protesters and activists descending on Neah Bay to register their outrage. Scenes became ugly with incidents of racist abuse, denouncing the Makah as ‘savages’ and firing flares at their vessels. In the words of Carl Haarstad, resident of nearby Port Angeles: “It was a circus. You had the Makah in their canoes, the Greenpeace activists on jetskis trying to disrupt them and the coastguard trying to keep the two apart.”
“The whole community was involved, not just the seven men in that canoe,” says McCarty. “It was a great honour to be part of it and everyone played a role. People outside need to realise what these animals mean to us. It’s not a commercial crop, it’s a spiritual thing.”
For the Makah, the rights in question were not those of the animal but those accorded to their people – treaty rights which have a long history of not being honoured by US governments. Back at the Makah museum, Wachendorf points out relics from the 1970s Ozette excavation that show whaling – from canoe-building to physical training, spiritual preparation and knowledge of the ocean – pre-dated the arrival of Europeans, a useful bargaining chip in the Makah.
“The same people have lived here for thousands of years, and now we’re asked to pay for the mistakes of others,” says Wachendorf. “It took us a hundred years and millions of dollars just to ratify our treaty rights about fishing. How long’s it going to take about whaling?”
Fishing, at least, is still what keeps the town alive, if not always in terms of subsistence. The sport fishing season has just opened for non-natives and as the afternoon draws to a close, the seafront is buzzing with boats returning with catch.
Gary Gorrs, a charter skipper since 1970, is upbeat about the current situation. “When I started out this was the salmon fishing capital of the west coast,” he recalls. “Then with overfishing and logging destroying the spawning grounds, it was restricted. Now the salmon are back and we have quotas to ensure the stocks will last. Everybody gets a piece of the pie.”
The Makah argue that gray whale stocks are also abundant once again, but while marine research supports this claim, objections to the methods and reasons for whaling kept the battle in the courts. In 2002, the US Court of Appeal ruled that the whale hunt was in violation of the Marine Mammal Protection Act – a victory for the whales, yet a devastating blow to the cause of native people.
To Wachendorf, the issue is not animal rights but treaty rights, and this – another incidence of the Government failing to honour them – is another step towards the slow eradication of native culture.
“Government policy is to assimilate, culturate and terminate,” he says. “‘Cept [George W] Bush doesn’t use the word terminate. He simply says ‘You’re extinct’. When you declare a tribe extinct there’s no more treaty, no more reservation and the government has no more responsibility.” It may sound like conspiracy theory, but this isn’t the stuff of fantasy. The Makah have less than 300 enrolled tribal members who are ‘provable’ to the government, ie with both parents enrolled and living on the reservation. If someone is less than a quarter pure Makah blood then they are no longer counted. As traditional ties are worn away, the future becomes ever more uncertain.
The Hummingbird, the ocean-going canoe used in the hunt, is still used to take young people on tribal journeys, teaching them to sing and dance, how to act properly, how to gather traditional foods and bring them to the elders. But it is whaling that is at the heart of Makah culture, and despite the controversy and legal wrangling, the desire to continue this tradition burns as strong as ever for people like McCarty.
“Our children have witnessed it and they aren’t going to let it go. There are still men here ready to go do it again.” She pulls from her freezer a slab of whale meat – the last remaining from the hunt – and I notice the traditional banding on her arm. Whale tails, harpoons and canoes are tattooed for eternity onto her skin, a stark declaration of what this issue means to her.
“There’s not much whale meat left in the village,” she says, her gaze direct and defiant. “People are hungry for it.””
