What makes Ozette important is not the drama of the mudslide or the scale of the collection.

What makes it important is what it revealed: that the material culture of the pre-contact Makah community was rich, sophisticated, and continuous with the traditions that survived into the contact period and that the Makah community maintains today.

The woodworking, the whaling technology, the artistic tradition, the household organization documented at Ozette are not the record of a disappeared way of life.

They are the ancestral foundation of a living cultural tradition.