Resurrection

Makah Nation, Neah Bay, Washington

A cool spring evening envelops a cedar-plank house overlooking the rocky beach in the Makah whaling village of Ozette.

Inside, a young boy sleeps on a wooden bench. A toy bow and arrow lie next to his head. Nearby, a woman tends the fires in the home of the whaling chief, his relatives and his slaves.

The other two dozen people living in the sixty-foot longhouse are away. The latest catch demands their attention to the hunt and the ceremonies.

Freshly butchered sea mammals and filleted halibut are drying on racks above the longhouse. Baskets adorned with whale patterns are stuffed with dried fish, berries, shellfish and roots gathered from nearby tidal pools and the steep hillsides of the rain forest, which looms over the beach and extends miles inland to snowcapped mountains that feed salmon-filled rivers.

Hunting gear -- yew-wood harpoons, sealskin floats, lines made from cedar bark and harpoon tips crafted from mussel shells and elk antlers -- is stowed in the whaling chief's corner of the longhouse.

In another corner, occupied by the fisherman, small cedar boxes hold hemlock fishing hooks -- ingeniously crafted devices used to catch thousands of halibut feeding on banks far offshore.

Cedar bark mats hanging from the rafters offer privacy for the sleeping benches of the communal household.

Outside, fishing, whaling and sealing canoes carved from giant red cedar trees are drawn up on the beach.

This evening is no different from thousands before, and thousands yet to come, until the disaster strikes.

Without warning, the silty sand and clay hillside liquefies, triggering a tsunami of suffocating mud that cascades toward the structure. The mud swallows the house, collapses the walls inward and carries the roof toward the beach.

The woman and child vanish inside the avalanche of soil.

The deadly slurry captures, then holds for an eternity, an instant of daily life of the Makah Indians. It is 1500 A.D.

At the other end of the continent, Spaniards are only beginning their conquest of the Mayan and Aztec cultures. It will take hundreds of years, but white men will eventually find the whaling peoples of the Makah Nation.

Five centuries later, a young newspaper boy, an Indian child, pedals his bicycle through the small town of Neah Bay, about fifteen miles north of Ozette. A couple of cars cruise down the main drag of the town where 1,200 or so Makah make their home on a small bay facing north, toward the Strait of Juan de Fuca.

The boy rides past the harbor where fishermen unload halibut into wheelbarrows, past the totem pole-flanked general store, past the town's only breakfast shop -- the Makah Maiden Cafe.

The boy stops at a steel-paneled warehouse. Inside, he finds archaeologists and Makah tribal members carefully sifting through thousands of artifacts being extracted from the 500-year-old longhouse at Ozette.

A powerful winter storm in 1970 uncovered the ancient village's remains, launching one of the greatest archaeological excavations in North America. Scientists from Washington State University, Makah tribal members and volunteers from around the world are sifting through the remarkably preserved artifacts.

The research center's director shows the boy the latest prize -- a mussel-shell harpoon tip that a whaling captain long ago imbedded into a whale's vertebra.

"I thought, 'What power that man must have had to do such a thing,'" says 38-year-old Theron Parker, remembering that boyhood moment.

A persistent image is pressed into Parker's mind: a Makah whaler walking barefoot across the beach, holding a heavy harpoon and two sealskin floats, his long black hair enmeshed in a fur coat, a determined expression on his face.

That image, along with other fragments of the past, would endure -- whispering to Parker through the travails of drinking, drugs and exile that would lead him away from his Makah homeland.

But like the gray whales that return each year, Parker was drawn back to Neah Bay. There, Parker found himself on a collision course that would force him to confront himself, and force his tribe to confront the world.

In mid-1995, the Makah Tribal Council stunned the globe when it announced plans to resume hunting the Eastern Pacific gray whale.

A tribe that few could locate on a map became the target of a worldwide media eruption.

For the previous thirteen years, most of the world's nations had embraced a moratorium on commercial whaling. Whales had become the symbol of the environmental movement and in many cases were elevated to a level equal to or, for some, exceeding the value of humanity.

The Makah tribe's plans to resume whaling seemed completely out of step with "modern" morality.

But the Makah whaling history dates possibly back to the time of Jesus. They also have an intimate connection with the whale -- one that has permeated their society for twenty centuries.

The Makahs voluntarily ceased their long communion with whales in the 1920s. Between 1845 and 1874, commercial whaling fleets of the United States and Britain used harpoon guns to slaughter roughly 8,000 gray whales, including a substantial portion of females. By the turn of the twentieth century there were too few whales to hunt, even for the Makah, who traditionally harvested five to ten whales a year. It became unprofitable for the tribe to engage in expensive and dangerous whale hunts.