AT THE SOUTHERN CUSP of Cape Flattery in Washington, off a long sandy beach tucked away from the Northern Pacific’s rough seas, seven dancers hide. They crouch inside the belly of a puppet, in the shape of a humpback whale. They move the whale’s fins and flukes. Feathers spew from its blowhole. Then, one by one, they crawl out through its mouth, wearing shawls and sea serpent headdresses. Slowly, they look around. High above the dancers, perched on a cliff, a Thunderbird puppet lurks, waiting. A crowd watches at Wa-atch, one of the people’s five villages — Waʔač̓, in the language of the Qʷidiččaʔa·tx̌, the people of the cape.
Thunderbird swoops down and snatches the whale puppet in his talons, just like he taught the Qʷidiččaʔa·tx̌ to do in the beginning, when they first hunted the giant sea mammals.
Chief Hiškʷi·sa·na·kši·ł, or Hishka, stands in front as the dancers perform the last song of the potlatch near the Wa-atch River on a late-summer evening.
That was only three generations ago, not long after the U.S. government sent so-called Indian agents to assimilate the people of the cape, now known as Makah.
Hishka, who was born in 1845, harpooned humpbacks and gray whales from canoes he carved himself, like other Makah chiefs before him. He was among the last hereditary chiefs to do so. Commercial whaling drove the animals to near extinction, and, by the 1920s, the Makah voluntarily stopped hunting them. Meanwhile, state and federal conservation laws legislated the people out of their own coveted waters, where halibut, salmon, seals and whales sustained them — an entire nation — and made them wealthy. The tribe wouldn’t hunt whales again until the late 1990s.
“He knew it was going to be different forever,” Hishka’s great-grandson, Micah McCarty, said, as he waited for paint to dry on a redcedar mask he’d carved in his woodshop in Neah Bay, home to the Makah Tribe in the northwesternmost corner of Washington. The puppets, McCarty thought, were a way for Hishka to “commemorate and honor” Makah identity, “who we are and where we come from.”
Hishka made the whale puppet from canvas and linen, tying cedar branches together in big hoops to give it the right shape. With tall ship rigging, he engineered a system of ropes and pulleys so the Thunderbird could fly down from the cliff and pick up the whale. “It was a theatrical thing,” McCarty said of the performance, “to send a message to the people that we’re still gonna be who the fuck we are.”
In the decades after Hishka’s ceremony, the United States government banned potlatches, the central political, social and economic system of the Makah and other Northwest Coast peoples. During potlatches, chiefs gave away food, money and
