Makah

The Makah are a Wakashan-speaking people of the Pacific Northwest Coast, settled at Cape Flattery and Neah Bay on the Olympic Peninsula. They call themselves qʷidiččaʔa·tx̌, the people who live by the rocks and seagulls, while Makah comes from a S'Klallam word meaning generous with food. They lived in cedar longhouses and hollowed whole trees into canoes.

From these canoes they hunted gray and humpback whales with yew-wood harpoons tipped with mussel shell and towed seal-skin floats, then welcomed the whale's spirit with ceremony and divided the meat and oil at potlatches.

In the early seventeenth century a mudslide buried part of the village of Ozette, preserving its houses. In 1834 a dismasted Japanese junk wrecked near Cape Flattery, and the Makah kept its three survivors as slaves before handing them on at Fort Vancouver.