Before European contact, the Makah occupied five major villages strung along the coast: Waatch, Sooes, Deah, Ozette, and Bahaada. Each was positioned for access to the marine resources that sustained the tribe -- whale, seal, salmon, halibut, and an enormous variety of shellfish. The village of Ozette, on the open coast south of Cape Alava, was the primary staging point for whale hunts that could take paddlers thirty, forty, or a hundred miles out to sea. Around 1560, a mudslide buried a portion of Ozette, preserving longhouses and their contents under layers of earth until a storm in 1970 exposed the site. Archaeologists and Makah members spent eleven years excavating more than 55,000 artifacts -- whaling gear, fishing tools, toys, bows and arrows -- roughly 30,000 of them made of wood, a material that almost never survives centuries of burial.

On January 31, 1855, the Makah signed the Treaty of Neah Bay, ceding 300,000 acres of their traditional territory to the United States in exchange for the reservation, a $30,000 annuity, and rights that remain unique in American law. The treaty explicitly preserved the Makah's right to hunt whales -- making it the only treaty between the United States and a tribe that includes whaling rights. Captain John Meares, the first European to make contact with the Makah in June 1788, had found a people unwilling to trade with the British. By 1855, the terms of engagement had changed, but the Makah negotiated to keep what mattered most. The treaty was not conducted in the Makah language; the government used the S'Klallam-language name for the tribe rather than the Makah endonym.

The excavation at Ozette revealed traditional longhouses roughly thirty by seventy feet, each divided into five living quarters with a cooking fire at the center of each room. What surprised researchers was the engineering. Because the Makah moved with the seasons, their longhouses were designed with removable wall sections that could be taken down, transported, and reassembled at other locations. Cedar was the essential material -- western red cedar for the structure, cedar bark for water-resistant clothing and hats, cedar roots for basket weaving, entire cedar trunks carved into the canoes used for whale hunts. The whaling canoes seated six to nine people and were paddled into the open Pacific, where hunters spent weeks in spiritual preparation before approaching a gray or humpback whale from its left side and striking with a harpoon of yew wood tipped with mussel shell.

Neah Bay is the reservation's largest community, a small fishing village where most of the approximately 1,600 enrolled Makah live. The median household income is roughly $47,000. Forestry and fishing remain the primary economic activities, supplemented by a growing tourism economy. The Cape Flattery Trail draws hikers to observation points overlooking Tatoosh Island. Hobuck Beach and Shi Shi Beach attract surfers and backpackers. A twenty-dollar recreation permit is required to access most sites, and that revenue supports tribal operations. The Makah Cultural and Research Center, which opened in 1979, houses artifacts from the Ozette excavation and serves as a museum, archive, and center for the Makah Language Program. The language, Qwi-qwi-dichchaq, belongs to the Southern Nootkan branch of the Wakashan family -- the only Wakashan language spoken in the United States. Teaching it to the next generation is one of the reservation's quiet priorities.