Behind the village, the forest provided the structural raw material for the longhouses and the canoes, and a range of other terrestrial resources.

But the orientation of Makah life was toward the ocean.

The Makah were, and are, the only Native nation in the United States with an explicitly treaty-protected right to whale.

That right, enshrined in the Treaty of Neah Bay signed in 1855, reflects the centrality of whaling to Makah cultural identity and economy.

The whale hunt was not merely a source of food.

It was a cultural and spiritual practice of enormous significance, a foundation of social prestige, an expression of complex relationships between human communities and the sea.