The collection remains with the Makah, housed and interpreted at the Makah Cultural and Research Center in Neah Bay.

It is living cultural heritage, continuously engaged by a living community that uses it for cultural education, for language revitalization, for the practical understanding of ancestral technology that the canoe culture revival and the ongoing effort to exercise treaty whaling rights require.

The mud preserved the objects.

The community preserved the meaning.

The storm that began to expose what the mud had held was not the beginning of the Makah people’s knowledge of what was there.

It was the moment when the rest of the world could begin to learn what the Makah had never entirely forgotten.