The tribe wouldn’t hunt whales again until the late 1990s. 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. Commercial whaling drove the animals to near-extinction, and, by the 1920s, the Makah voluntarily stopped hunting them. He was among the last hereditary chiefs to do so. Hishka, born in 1845, harpooned humpbacks and gray whales from canoes he carved himself, like other Makah chiefs before him. government sent so-called Indian agents to assimilate the people of the cape, now known as Makah. That was only three generations ago, not long after the U.S. 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. tx̌ to do in the beginning, when they first hunted the giant sea mammals.Ĭhief Hiškʷi.Thunderbird swoops down and snatches the whale puppet in his talons, just like he taught the Qʷidiččaʔa
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