They experienced the dramatic disruptions of disease, displacement, and the restrictions that followed contact and the imposition of colonial governance, but they persisted as a community, maintained essential elements of their cultural traditions, and continue to inhabit their ancestral territory.

The Living Tradition

The Makah Tribe today is a federally recognized Native nation with a reservation at Neah Bay, at the northwestern tip of the Olympic Peninsula.

The tribe maintains its governmental structure, its cultural institutions, and its relationship to the marine resources that have been central to Makah life for as long as memory extends.

The whaling rights that the Makah had explicitly protected in the Treaty of Neah Bay were not exercised for several decades after the disruptions of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

In 1999, following a long process of legal preparation and cultural revitalization, a Makah crew conducted the first tribal whale hunt in more than 70 years, taking a gray whale in accordance with both treaty rights and an agreement with the International Whaling Commission.