The Native Village Buried By A Mudslide For 500 Years — And The 55,000 Artifacts Found Preserved Beneath The Mud

The treaty rights that the Makah have preserved through generations of legal and political struggle are still being exercised and defended.

The storm did not begin the story.

The slide that preceded it by 500 years was not the end of the community that experienced it.

The excavation that followed was not the recovery of a lost civilization but the recovery of extraordinary material evidence that deepened the documented record of a history the Makah had never entirely lost.

A disaster preserved an archive.

The community preserved the knowledge of the archive.