“Our treaty is a living document just like the Constitution,” said Makah tribal member John Haupt during a public hearing about the tribe’s proposed whale hunt. “You are making something simple, complicated – we ceded thousands of acres of land in exchange for protection of our rights on the ocean.” The hearing, held in Port […]
The Makah Tribe continues to work toward exercising their treaty right to hunt the gray whale, removed from the federal Endangered Species list in 1994, through a process to access the exemption listed in the Marine Mammal Protection Act. NOAA Fisheries is inviting public comments on a new Draft Environmental Impact Statement (DEIS) that evaluates […]
The Makah Tribe will celebrate the opening of their new $13.8 million dock at 11 a.m., Oct. 10 with a blessing and ribbon cutting even as they prepare for phase two of the facility. The new 120-foot long, two-lane dock has a state-of-the-art ice machine capable of holding 110 tons of ice and has five […]
Standing in the sunroof of a truck, Kim Sager-Fradkin points her spotlight into a dark clearcut, searching for pairs of reflective deer eyes. Spotlighting is just one method the Lower Elwha Klallam Tribe’s wildlife biologist is using to count the black-tailed deer population on the North Olympic Peninsula as part of a three-year study. “Very […]
Washington Governor Jay Inslee visited the Hoh, Quileute and Makah tribes Friday and heard a number of environmental concerns. See the article in the Peninsula Daily News.
Makah tribal member Ben Johnson, who as chairman, championed the tribe’s first whale hunt in 70 years, passed at Olympic Medical Center March 31 following a heart attack. He was 74. A celebration of life was held April 5 and the obituary submitted by the family can be found here.
A fish hook has tied history, culture and the Makah community together in unexpected ways. The čibu·d (pronounced “cha bood”), or halibut hook, became the subject of a student project during an internship with Makah Fisheries Management. “I had a student, Larry Buzzell, come to me wanting to do a project that related to historical […]
On Washington’s rugged Pacific coast, the Quinault Indian Nation has depended on salmon for thousands of years. But the glaciers that feed the Quinault and Queets Rivers and sustain these salmon populations are in retreat because of climate change, threatening the very survival of the salmon. In Alaska, native villages are pulling up stakes and […]
The inaugural First Stewards symposium, to be held July 17-20 in Washington, D.C. is a national event that examines the impact of climate change on indigenous coastal cultures and explores solutions based on millennia of traditional ecological knowledge. Hundreds of native leaders, witnesses and climate scientists will join policy-makers and non-government organizations for groundbreaking dialogue […]
Bull elk on the north Olympic Peninsula are surviving today at roughly the same rate as they did in the late 1980s and early 1990s, according to early results of a two-year study by the Makah Tribe. The tribe is halfway through the second year of a bull and calf elk survival study to update […]
