The Makah call themselves Kwih-dich-chuh-ahtx, the people who live by the rocks and the seagulls, and the museum they opened at Neah Bay is arranged around the life of a whaling people: a full-size cedar longhouse, the canoes, and the harpoons, lines and sealskin floats of the hunt, many of them recovered from the houses the mudslide buried at Ozette.
On January 31, 1855, Makah leaders from the villages at Neah, Waatch, Tsoo-Yess and Ozette signed a treaty with Governor Isaac Stevens that gave up nearly all their land and kept a small reservation around Cape Flattery. Its fourth article secures their right of taking fish "and of whaling or sealing," which makes it the only treaty the United States ever signed that names whaling. The Makah stopped hunting whales in the 1920s, after commercial whalers had all but emptied the ocean of gray whales. When the whales recovered, a Makah crew trained in the old ways, and on May 17, 1999, paddling a cedar canoe, they took a gray whale, the tribe's first in some seventy years, against protests on the water and in the courts. A federal court later ruled that the tribe needed a waiver under the Marine Mammal Protection Act. The Makah applied in 2005, and in June 2024 NOAA Fisheries granted it, allowing up to twenty-five gray whales over ten years, each hunt still under a federal permit.
Neah Bay sits at the end of SR-112 on the Strait of Juan de Fuca. A short trail through Makah forest beyond town leads to the cliffs at Cape Flattery, the northwest corner of the contiguous United States, looking out to Tatoosh Island.
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