The puppets, McCarty thought, were a way for Hishka to “commemorate and honor” Makah identity, “who we are and where we come from.” “He knew it was going to be different forever,” Hishka’s great-grandson, Micah McCarty, said, as he waited for paint to dry on a redcedar mask he’d carved in his woodshop in Neah Bay, home to the Makah Tribe in the northwesternmost corner of Washington. 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.
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